Case Study: Kowloon Walled City and Ladies Market

Kowloon Walled City (hereafter the Walled City), demolished in 1993 and re-constructed into a park in 1995, was a self-governed Chinese exclave beyond the governance of the British rule. As Hong Kong Island became a British colony in 1842, the Qing government in China mobilized its army and cannons to the Walled City for defense. Once the Convention between the United Kingdom and China Respecting an Extension of Hong Kong Territory was signed in 1898, the whole Hong Kong was at the mercy of the British colonization, except the Walled City.²⁵ It then functioned as the military and administrative base of the Qing government.²⁶ Within the Walled City, the Qing officers and army constituted their own community and exercised their sovereign power. About the dynamics between space and power, Michel Foucault makes a succinct conclusive remark in an interview entitled “Space, Power and Knowledge”: “Space is fundamental in any form of communal life; space is

fundamental in any exercise of power” (168). The British government, however, was unwilling to relinquish the sovereignty of the entire Hong Kong, consequently

invading the Walled City in 1899 and expelling all the Qing officers, which left it in a vacuum state until the end of the Second World War.²⁷ The influx of refugees from the Mainland China after the inauguration of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 poured into the Walled City and made it the world’s most densely populated area with

25 Under the terms of the convention, the New Territories, that is north of Boundary Street and south of Shenzhen River, and all the outer islands were leased to Britain for 99 years with no rental involved, and were colonized in Britain’s hands.

26 The Qing government insisted to maintain the sovereignty of the Walled City on the grounds of the establishment of a foothold so as to enable Chinese army troops, merchants, and ships to enter the

city justifiably, exerting military and economical influences on and gaining considerable benefits from Hong Kong (Sin et al. 12).

27 During the Second World War, the Japanese troops occupied Hong Kong from December 1941 to August 1945, which is commonly known as Three Years and Eight Months. They destroyed the ramparts of the Walled City due to the expansion of Kai Tak Airport; thus, the Walled City was literally devoid of walls after WWII.

a population density of over 1 million per square kilometer.²⁸ Owing to the

overpopulation and the lack of management,²⁹ the Walled City was transformed into a lawless, chaotic and unwholesome slum area, a hotbed of crime, prostitution, gambling, and drug. The following description of the Walled City by a travel writer Jan Morris could help us to imagine the Walled City at that time:

One after another, glass-fronted to the street, they are the surgeries of unqualified dentists. Their windows are full of pickled abscesses, illustrations of impacted wisdom teeth, grinning rows of dentures. . . . A maze of dark dank alleys pierces the mass from one side to the other.

Virtually no daylight reaches them. Looped electric cables festoon their low ceilings, dripping alarmingly with moisture. It is like a bunker.

Sometimes you seem to be all alone, every door locked around you (293, 295).

Guaranteed in the 1898 convention, the Walled City, though left empty and

unmanaged before the Second World War, remained a Chinese territory and attracted Chinese refugees to sojourn for the sake of security regardless of the poor and repulsive milieu.³⁰

The preservation of the Chinese sovereignty over the Walled City thus engenders the complexity of Hong Kongers’ construction of national identity. As shown above, Chinese refugees flushed into the Walled City, in hope of securing their safety in a Chinese exclave. Except the illegal immigrants from China, those who

28 Manipulated by Britain, the Hong Kong government sent police to march into the Walled City to expel Chinese refugees and demolish numerous buildings, aiming to gain control over it. This event afterwards engendered a huge protest in Guangzhou, China. After several times of negotiation, all suppressions finally came to an end.

29 The Walled City later became a no-man’s-land (三不管地帶), meaning that it is a place that the Hong Kong government dared not manage, the British government did not want to manage, and the Chinese government could not manage (香港政府不敢管，英國政府不想管，中國政府不能管).

30 The British government was so aggressive that it plotted to occupy the Walled City after its vacancy; in response, the Chinese government decried its action and strived to re-claim the sovereignty of the Walled City but ended in failure.

legally crossed the border and entered Hong Kong, known as the first generation, strived for a Hong Kong identity card. After the 1967 Leftist riots, most people in Hong Kong posed themselves as Hong Kongers. Living in the close-knit community in the Walled City, the Chinese refugees would consider themselves Chinese; however, they would have to shift their identity to a Hong Konger and assimilate into the

society once they step out of the Walled City in order to assimilate into the society.

The complexity of the construction of national identity demonstrates the fluidity and instability of identity in Hong Kong, a modern city that is fraught of various

significations and connotations.

Different from the Walled City as a space free from colonial influence, Ladies’

Market epitomizes what Abbas terms “colonial space.” In “Building on

Disappearance: Hong Kong Architecture and Colonial Space,” Abbas specifically investigates Hong Kong architecture from the perspective of colonial history.

“Colonial space,” Abbas writes, “can be thought of as the projection of a colonial imaginary that maps out a symbolic order in whose grids the real appears and disappears for a colonial subject” (148). In other words, it is a space molded

according to the colonial imaginary, and what is displayed/hidden is conditioned by the colonial subject. Abbas further manifests that cultural preservation in terms of architecture in Hong Kong is a strategic device “to exclude the dirt and pain [of colonialism]” and to erase local history for the sake of consolidating and stabilizing British governance and manipulation (149). Ladies’ Market, located at Tung Choi Street between Argyle Street and Dundas Street, reveals Britain’s intention to transform Hong Kong into a metropolis by means of capitalization and

commodification. Tung Choi Street, literally meaning Water Spinach Street, used to be a farmland. Once the British rule embarked on capitalization, the farming terrain

was eliminated and replaced by commercial-residential buildings for being leased to street vending business. The appellation of Tung Choi Street remains the same;

however, at least in local Hong Kongers’ mind, it has already become a disordered alley for cheap clothes, accessories, appliances and daily necessities; the street’s agricultural history is almost gone. Britain the colonizer did preserve the street name (local history), but at the same time has converted it into a capitalized market for capital accumulation (colonial imaginary).³¹ This maneuver, on the one hand, soothed the enmity of the colonized populace by incorporating foreign intrusive British

administration (the commercialization of the street) with local inherent Chinese culture (keeping the original name); on the other hand, this kind of preservation echoed what Anthony D. King terms “the preservation syndrome”:

[I]n the colonial context, this has a double irony. Not only does planning effort go into inculcating the colonized culture with similar values but the criteria of the colonial power are used to define and “preserve” “buildings of architectural and historic importance,” while remnants of the

indigenous culture are left to disappear. (56)

Britain values “the colonized culture” by preserving the original name but at the same time endeavors to erase the local history by developing it into a new scenic spot for commercial activity. Localness is obviously displayed, but with no contents of local history. Such phenomenon is congruous with Abbas’s notion of “colonial space” and

“space of disappearance.”

Ladies’ Market is also a domain of commodified space. Situated along the coastline and in a non-seismic zone accompanied with non-frozen deep harbor, Hong

31 Tung Choi Street is divided into two parts: Ladies Market and Goldfish Market. The latter traditionally was an area devoted to selling goldfish, but was later flushed in by pet shops selling different kinds of animals, from cats and dogs to beetles and reptiles. Agriculture has been fully wiped out and replaced by commercial activities.

Kong was at first spotted by Britain to have a high potentiality of developing into an entrepôt for global capital accumulation; commodity production continues non-stop during and after British colonization. As a result, “a fetishism of material wealth”

featured by “a rampant and rapacious desire for material advancement” roots and sprouts in Hong Kongers’ ideology (Lau 69). This fetishism of commodity applies not only to products but also to space. For instance, the section of Ladies’ Market is demarcated as a pedestrian zone for consumerist activity for 8 hours per day on weekdays and 12 hours per day during weekends. It is regulated into different booths (in the middle of the road) or stores (along the road) that are leased to entrepreneurs who are eager to make profits. Space is, in short, commodified for capital

accumulation under “total surveillance and control”, for the benefits of both the entrepreneurs and the government (Cuthbert 146). This was one of the ways for the British government to gain control over and monitor Hong Kong’s space, and how it inculcated the capitalistic ideology into Hong Kongers before 1997.³² Commodity fetishism and consumerism disperse into every corner. Suffice it to say that Hong Kongers’ are not so much infatuated with spiritual enlightenment as with material fulfillment, fervently desiring for money in all forms, be it portable cash or immovable property.

Apart from the colonization and commodification of space, the renaming of Tung Choi Street as Ladies’ Market emanates a smell of genderization. Once Tung Choi Street was developed into an alley for shopping, vendors targeted at female customers and mainly retailed women’s clothing and accessories; this explains why it was named as Ladies Market, a female place. This instance justifies how most people

32 As Hong Kong is tremendously capitalized and commodified, social open space is combined with commodified space which is under surveillance. Due to the coming of 1997, Britain plotted to offer benefits for private developers to purchase property if they were willing to provide open space; that is to say, more developers would own the space as private for the avoidance of socialization and Chinesization when the day of handover approached. See Cuthbert for further discussion.

consider shopping as a female activity. In Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, Paco Underhill has remarked on how shopping is feminized: “Shopping is female.

When men shop, they are engaging in what is inherently a female activity” (113; italic original). This somatic marker, what scientist Antonio Damasio calls, is inscribed and then internalized in people’s mind like “a kind of bookmark, or shortcut, in our brains” (Lindstrom 131). A man, if circumscribed by such circumstances, would be double feminized when he was engaged in shopping at Ladies Market.

Britain, diffusing Eurocentric ideology and constructing Western-based rigid structures, is sculpturing Hong Kong into, as Eileen Chang delineates, “a city of both grandeur and sorrow.” As a foreign sovereign and unaware of the Hong Kong local culture, Britain crowns herself a civilized country to rule Hong Kong and its people.

She clings to the capitalist system and governs Hong Kong in recourse to this framework. Before 1997, the beauty of Hong Kong, according to Morris’s aesthetic sense, was derived from its capitalist system (33). This is so convincing that Hong Kong used to be, and still is, illustrious for its titles, such as Asia’s World City (亞洲 國際都會), The Shopping Paradise (購物天堂), and City of Life (動感之都). Hong Kongers consciously welcomed the manipulation of the Eurocentric ideology and to fall into the economic and cultural structures constructed by Britain; in other words, Hong Kong is thus transformed into an ivory tower. What the people yearned for was to embrace the British culture by abandoning part, or all in the case of neutralization of becoming a British, of their Chineseness. Such abandonment leads to the sorrow that Hong Kongers were constantly conflicting with their national identity—moving in-between as they could never be fully accepted by Britain and were no longer a full Chinese—in the Sisyphean journey of whether identifying themselves as a Hong Konger or a Chinese that ultimately leads to the loss of self. The British rule not only

stirs up the confliction of national identity but also intensifies the gender relations in terms of space. The following two chapters will probe into these issues by analyzing Elsie Sze’s Hui Gui: A Chinese Story.