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Article: Dooming a slum Hong Kong's infamous Walled City will be dynamited
- Article from:
- The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
- Article date:
- June 13, 1991
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) The Boston Globe. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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HONG KONG -- For nine decades the Walled City has festered in the
heart of this British colony's sleek Kowloon district, a lawless
seven-acre enclave of opium parlors, whorehouses and gambling dens
where police, health inspectors, and even tax collectors have not
dared to tread.
The Cantonese call it Hak Nam, the City of Darkness. It is a
ghetto of bizarre history whose 40,000 denizens, ranging from
criminal gangs called triads to hundreds of unlicensed dentists and
doctors, dwell in perpetual twilight.
Ramshackle multistory structures, put up without regard to any
building code, tower so high and lean so precariously together that
hardly a ray of light reaches the tangle of dank alleys ...