Chungking Express

Off to the cinema to see Chungking Express, a brand-new cyberpunk science fiction film set in a futuristic city that looks like something from a William Gibson novel. It tells the tale of a bunch of human-like androids who fall in and out of love, set against a finely-detailed backdrop of neon signs and old-fashioned corded phones.

Production-wise the film is a spot-on recreation of Hong Kong circa 1994, something the production team achieved by travelling back in time and filming the entire movie in 1994. To make things real spicy-like they even released it in 1994, and then they returned to the present day and...

No, I'm kidding. Chungking Express isn't a cyberpunk film. It's just a film. From long ago and far away.

Chungking Express was written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, who was born in Shanghai in 1958. His family moved to Hong Kong while he was a child, where he grew up watching television. In his twenties he got a job as a TV scriptwriter, before moving to the film industry. In another world he might nowadays be famous for Sexy Lady Assassin 13 or Shaolin Deadly Windows: Punch Hard, but he forged his own path.

Chungking was filmed in late 1993 and early 1994, released in 1994 in Hong Kong and, after strong word of mouth, internationally in 1995. It established Wong Kar-wai's reputation outside Hong Kong, and today it's a modern classic. A likeable film, a good-looking film, a good-sounding film, a good-tasting film, etc, but by gosh it has problems. It reminds me a bit of Wings of Desire, in the sense that almost everything works except for the core emotional drama. But I can understand why film critics like it. It's very much a film-maker's film, a filmy film, one of the filmiest films that doesn't actually have characters making a film in it. Quentin Tarantino was, famously, a fan. He persuaded Miramax to distribute it internationally.

I can see why Quentin Tarantino liked it, and not just because it has several lingering close-ups of women's feet. The film was shot on a tiny budget in the space of just two months, but despite being thrown together almost casually the film looks and sounds gorgeous, with winning performances from a bunch of charismatic actors. 

It's one of those films that inspires people to make a film. It has a real "let's grab a camera and make a film" quality. And in its defence it avoids the kind of self-absorbed narcissism that plagues "let's grab a camera"-style films. But it needed more time in the oven. A better script wouldn't have hurt the film at all.

Chungking is also one of those films that inspires people to make films with film, with 35mm film. It's a fantastic advert for 35mm film. The colours. The grain.

Back when Chungking came out Hollywood had mastered the technology of film to a point where the likes of Basic Instinct and True Lies had a glossy, almost digital sheen to them. But Hong Kong's film industry didn't have the money to lay on masses of floodlights and dolly tracks and cranes etc, so they had to shoot things quickly, often in cramped locations and poor lighting, with handheld cameras.

As a consequence Chungking Express has mistakes. It's a lot like life. It has masses of grain. The cramped locations necessitated tight close-ups, and sometimes the focus puller didn't get the focus right. And yet it looks wonderful, richly colourful and cinematic. Despite taking place in a bunch of objectively grotty locations in downtown Hong Kong it made me want to go there, but in 1994. Which you can't do any more. You can't go to Hong Kong in 1994 any more. It's gone.

I've been to Hong Kong. Chungking Express was one of the many reasons I went, but while there I wished I had been to Hong Kong in 1994. Back then the Kowloon Walled City still existed, although it was in the process of being demolished, and the main airport was at Kai Tak, uncomfortably close to the heart of the city. By the end of 1994 the walled city was gone, and Kai Tak closed in 1998.

If you wanted to remake Chungking Express nowadays you'd need to recreate old-fashioned Hong Kong with CGI. You'd need to run the whole thing through some top-notch software to add grain and make the colours look all neon, and put in the step-printing motion blur effect. You can still shoot in 35mm, but it costs a fortune, and the producers would insist that you add the scuzziness with software.

Chungking Express is a character drama set and shot in Hong Kong in 1994, by people who lived and worked there. It's often cited as one of the best products of the latter days of the golden age of the Hong Kong film industry, alongside Infernal Affairs (2002) and Wong Kar-wai's very own In the Mood for Love (2000). It was shot incredibly quickly and cheaply, in sequence, and although on an objective level it portrays Hong Kong as a horrible place it still manages to make the city look seductive. Chungking Express reminded me of the old quote about how it's hard to make an anti-war film, because war is intensely cinematic.

Hong Kong permeates the film, although we see surprisingly little of it. There's a fleeting glimpse of Kai Tak and a few long shots of the city, but for the most part Chungking Express takes place in a series of shops and bars and an apartment. Are they the real Hong Kong, and is Kai Tak just a distraction? I don't know. Apparently the budget was so low that one of the film's two cinematographers had to temporarily vacate his own apartment so that Kar-wai could use it as a filming location.

In theory the film could have taken place in New York or Manchester or anywhere with a nearby airport, but it wouldn't have been the same. Hong Kong is portrayed as an overcrowded, poverty-striken mess than nonetheless works, or at least people get along, and all of the major characters dream of a better life. In a way they all get happy endings, or at least they move on a little, which wouldn't have worked if the film had taken place in Manchester. There is no hope in Manchester, no future, nothing.

Now, objectively, Chungking Express is a mess. A big mess. It's essentially a series of semi-improvised scenes strung around the availability of the cast and the locations because Kar-wai had some free time.

Plot-wise the film divides into a forty-minute overture starring Brigitte Lin as a drug smuggler and Takeshi Kaneshiro as an undercover policeman, followed by an hour-long romantic drama starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Faye Wong, respectively a uniformed beat cop and a prototypical Manic Pixie Dream Girl, although Chungking predates Garden State by a decade so if he really wanted to, Kar-wai should sue Zach Braff instead.

There's an underlying unreality to the film. None of the characters feel like real people and the plot has a dream-like quality. The first story, with the drug smuggling, has the form of a crime drama, but the individual scenes feel disconnected. When the operation goes wrong Lin's accomplices vanish into thin air, and we never find out what happened to them. I have the impression that the smuggling operation goes wrong simply because that's what happens in films. If nothing went wrong there would be no drama.

The film implies that a certain character is Lin's gangster boss, although it never spells things out openly - I kept wondering if the gangster boss had been hired on an extra's wages, because he has no clear dialogue - and Lin eventually resolves the situation abruptly, without any build up. In the process she kidnaps a child and kills three people, in theory terrible acts, but none of it feels real. Her story interacts briefly with that of Kaneshiro, who is trying to get over a relationship breakup, although they only really share a couple of scenes. The film implies that they have no future together (presumably Lin's character flees Hong Kong to parts unknown) but the story is never resolved. It drifts away into the night.

I have the impression that Kar-wai wanted to turn this sequence into a miniature crime drama, but he didn't have the time or the means to flesh it out. Perhaps it was supposed to be a skeleton, but the film would be no worse if the introductory story had been longer and more involved. It's engaging, but despite including some of the film's most memorable images it feels unsatisfying.

The second story is more focused. Tony Leung Chiu-wai is a policeman, Officer 663, who has split up with his girlfriend. He meets Faye Wong, who helps out behind the counter of her cousin's takeaway, and she develops a crush on him. This extends to breaking into his apartment to fix things up, while he seems unaware of what must have been obvious tomfoolery. He even fails to notice her hiding in plain sight when he returns early one afternoon.

Even after the penny drops he doesn't mind, although you'd think that a policeman would be more worried about a stranger going through his personal things.

It struck me while watching the film that Leung's job as a policeman has no bearing on the plot at all, which raises the question of whether the producers hired a police uniform for Kaneshiro's character, but it arrived too late for his scenes, so they decided to make Leung a cop purely to get some use out of it.

I also pondered the pineapples. In the first story Kaneshiro's character collects tins of pineapples that expire on 01 May 1994. His birthday. Something to do with love having an expiry date. I wasn't sure if the dialogue was a knowing parody of romantic dialogue or if it was supposed to be taken seriously, and I'm unwilling to take a stand because the subtitles might not have captured the nuance. In a neat piece of cinéma vérité the film was released only two months after 01 May 1994, which raises the question of whether audiences in Hong Kong rushed home to see if they also had tins of pineapple that expired on that date. Perhaps those tins were collectors' items for a while.

I have some other questions. The film was apparently shot in or around New Year 1994. Did the props people scour Hong Kong for tins of pineapple that were due to expire five months later, or did they have them made up? How long does an unopened tin of pineapple last? Did they pick the date before gathering up the cans, or did they bulk-buy a load of cans that happened to expire on that day, or what? Did the entire film come about because Wong Kar-wai had a cheap deal on canned pineapples?

I wrote all these questions down on a notepad while watching the film. I made eighty-five pages of notes. One day I will post the notepad to Wong Kar-wai. One day.

They vex me, those cans. Still, the film. The second story is more involved than the first, but it doesn't work either. As mentioned up the page it has the same problem as Wings of Desire. Individually Tony Leung and Faye Wong are charismatic, but they have no chemistry together. I didn't believe for a moment they had any kind of romantic attraction. Age-wise they were surprisingly close in 1994 - and I suppose every other year, because neither actor has been accelerated to near-light speed - but Wong was a very young-looking 25 and Leung was a distinguished 32, so their relationship comes across more as father and daughter than fuck-buddies.

And although Faye Wong is fantastic in the role, something about her character made me uneasy. She's a playfully eccentric pixie of a kind that only exists in the minds of men. Nothing about her is real, not in this world, nowhere, not ever. On one level it's possible to read the second part of Chungking as a fantasy dreamed up by a bored policeman, in which Wong's character literally doesn't exist, but I don't think that's what Kar-wai was going for.

In the real world Faye Wong's character would have been sectioned, and in a parallel universe perhaps the film would have ended with Officer 663 smothering her with a pillow to put her out of her misery, a la Betty Blue or One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Despite the plaudits Chungking Express really does feel like a bunch of disjointed sequences improvised around the availability of the actors, and although both stories progress and have a resolution they feel like random events.

It's not a great film if you're on a diet, or if you feel hungry. Is the food symbolic? I suspect it was just a cheap way to give the actors something to do, but it's mouthwatering nonetheless.

It's hard to dislike Chungking Express. If you treat it was a dreamlike collection of nostalgic images rather than as a narrative film it's a lot more successful. Like some of the best science fiction Chungking Express isn't so much a narrative experience as a portrait of a fascinating alternative universe. It feels like the most carefree aspects of the mid-1990s, distilled into a nostalgic potion. I could have wallowed in it for hours. It's a structure, a construction. I suspect that the film's version of Hong Kong circa 1994 has very little in common with the reality, but it's a fascinating place to visit.

Would the film still work if Kar-wai had spent more time refining the script, if it was a conventional portmanteau film along the lines of Pulp Fiction? Yes, it would have been a much stronger film. Quite possibly a more boring, more ordinary film, but it would have been stronger.

On a technical level I saw the film at the Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square on 27 November 2022. It was a digital restoration projected digitally. The screen narrowed slightly before the film began; apparently the original international release was stretched or matted slightly to widescreen, whereas Wong Kar-wai wanted it to be less wide.

There's a famous shot of Officer 663 drinking coffee while the world passes by at high speed. The IMDB says that the international version has only background ambience at that point, but I'm sure the version I saw had Faye Wong's cover of The Cranberries' "Dreams" on the soundtrack instead. TVTropes is of the opinion that one character shoots another character twice, but in both the film I saw at the cinema and the DVD from which I gathered the screenshots there are five gunshot sounds. Perhaps it's just a minor difference in the sound dub. The subtitles have been revised. One character's pager password is "undying love" in the print I saw, but "love you for 10,000 years" on the DVD.

The original release has simple black-text-on-white ending credits The restoration has something that resembles a PowerPoint presentation. It doesn't fit the rest of the film.

For the record the Prince Charles Cinema showed the film in their upstairs screening room, and 104 of the 104 seats had been sold - there was even a note on the door to that effect - so after 28 years Chungking Express can still get bums on seats. Dreamers, every one.

MRE Menu 23: Pizza Slice, Pepperoni

Let's have a look at MRE Menu 23: Pizza Slice, Pepperoni. It was introduced relatively recently, in 2018, because the scientists who develop MREs couldn't find a way to make pizza remain shelf-stable for five years without it going off or turning brown.

South is at the top

Because I'm a debonair international man of leisure I decided to test out the MRE in Hong Kong, specifically Lantau to the west of the main island, and so I transported an MRE from Britain to the Far East, because I had space in my bag, and why not?

Hong Kong has army surplus stores, but I have no idea if they sell American MREs. My hunch is that army surplus stores in Korea are full of them, Hong Kong not so much. Of course if you're camping in Hong Kong there are plenty of other options for food. Pocari Sweat and Pocky sticks, for example.

I drank the coffee after coming back to the UK - I didn't have a kettle in Hong Kong. It was Bill's Brew, and as with all the other MRE coffee I have tried it was "hard" rather than "smooth".

Hong Kong is famous for its skyscrapers but it has acres of relatively wild countryside as well. A lot of the islands were abandoned in the 1970s when the locals got sick of living in abject poverty. They moved to Kowloon or emigrated to Britain and beyond, and no-one moved in to replace them. You'd think someone would buy up all the real estate and build houses there, but they would just turn into empty ghost estates because the islands don't have an infrastructure or jobs. Perhaps the Chinese authorities could dump refugees onto Hong Kong's islands and just forget about them. If they thrive, tax them; if they die, the spiders will eat well.

Hong Kong's islands are a bit like those Scottish islands that go on the market every so often. The idea of owning an entire island for five million pounds is intriguing, but my hunch is that the novelty wears off, at which point you're stuck with an extremely illiquid asset.

For this post I attempted to hike from Shek Pik reservoir (pictured above) to an abandoned fort in Fan Lau, on the extreme south-west corner of Lantau, but incompetence and inexperience defeated me, so I gave up half-way there. My tip is that you if you plan to do some hiking in Hong Kong, don't do it on the first day after you arrive. Start early in the morning and rest during the middle of the day. I'll write about it at some point.

Fan Lau is off on the horizon to the left of the mountain over yonder in the hazy distance

I reached this beach, Kau Ling Chung, and decided to turn back because I ran out of water. OSMAnd correctly pointed out that there was a water source at the beach's campsite, but it was untreated spring water, and lacking any means of water purification I decided not to risk drinking it.

It looked clean, but a little voice in my head kept saying "you're in Hong Kong, you moron", and have you ever read about the Death Valley Germans? None of the decisions they made were especially awful, and they were reasonably intelligent, but they still died.

The beach itself has mixed reviews on the internet. The big problem is litter. When I was there it wasn't too bad, but it did feel a bit grotty so I didn't hang around.

The meal contains a slice of pizza, some cherry cobbler - e.g. cherry crumble, minus the crumble - plus a vegetable cracker, cheese spread with jalapeno flavouring, an oatmeal cookie, and a chocolate drink. The accessory packet had some gum that I munched on the walk back, and some coffee I drank at home. As I drank the coffee I wished I could go back to Hong Kong, but sadly I only have a limited amount of money so Hong Kong will have to do without my sweet love for a while.

Top YouTube MRE reviewer and general good guy Steve1989 has also reviewed this MRE. I generally agree with his conclusions although I wasn't as fond of the main meal as him. MREs are packaged by different companies and have minor variations - his was packaged by Ameriqual, mine by Wornick:

Whenever I look at MRE packaging I think of the Fallout games. Ameriqual presumably stands for "American Quality". It's one of those government contractors that exists and employs hundreds of people, but you've never heard of it.

Two hundred years after the bombs drop there will be a sidequest where you infiltrate AmeriQual's factory in search of preserved food, but there'll be a twist. The food will be made of people, or it'll make you turn pink, or it'll be full of amphetamines etc, nb I am not suggesting that the real AmeriQual adulterates its food. I'm digressing here. Let's try the chocolate drink. I've had it before.

I've never noticed the sugar grains before. You're supposed to add water and swish it around in the packet to mix it up, but it doesn't mix very well. Every time I've had one of these drinks the chocolate ends up in clumps. Perhaps it would mix better with warm water.

My impression is that MREs are generally thought of as not bad by actual soldiers. The early menus attracted a lot of criticism, and some of the later meals are infamous - the vegetable omelette and "four fingers of death" sausages in particular - but on the whole the only major gripe is that they're salty and monotonous. In the comfort of my own home MRE chocolate drink is fine, but in the humid, 30c environment of Lantau Island in October the sugary-sweet mixture was pretty revolting, so I had to wash it down with more water.

For this review I ate part of the meal, then walked on a bit, then ate more of the meal. Hong Kong has tonnes of enormous spiders and other creepy-crawlies, and eating food is awkward because as soon as you put something on a surface ants crawl all over it. There isn't much shade, and in any case I don't trust the trees because they harbour giant spiders. The trees have no mercy.

Next I tried the cherry cobbler. You're supposed to heat it up, but before coming to Hong Kong I opened up the MRE and took out the flameless ration heater. British Airways' guidelines (PDF) implicitly allow FRHs - they mention MREs by name, and forbid the use of FRHs in flight, which implies that they don't mind if you simply transport them by air - but I didn't want to risk it. However the cherry cobbler was just fine cold:

It looked like the aftermath of a shotgun blast to the face but tasted pretty good, and the moisture was nice. Unlike the chocolate drink it wasn't overpoweringly sweet. In my experience the fruit flavours in MREs are surprisingly subtle.

Let's try the main event. The pizza:

It was surprisingly small, although in its defence it was chunky. Was it any good? Erm. It was thick and doughy and very dry. Perhaps if I had used the flameless ration heater some of the grease would have moistened up the pizza base, but it tasted like doughy bread with pizza flavour on top. It didn't taste bad, it just didn't feel much like pizza. In the end I had a few bites and tossed it into the undergrowth, because it was just too dry. This was a common theme running through the bulk of the meal.

Next up, the oatmeal cookie:

It was a big cookie, slightly larger than the pizza slice. I debated whether I should press it a few times or go for a true neverclick run, but after waiting a few minutes there were no golden cookies so visions of Dragonflight click frenzies receded from my mind. Then it struck me that the heat must be getting to my mind. Cookie Clicker isn't real life, besides which it's not even the right type of cookie. It doesn't have bits of chocolate in it.

It was perfectly fine but again very dry and sugary so after a few bites I donated it to the local wildlife. I threw it into the undergrowth and then tried very hard not to look in case I saw a swarming mass of giant spiders tearing it apart. For some insects on Lantau the day I decided to try out an MRE may have been the difference between life and death; for me, it was Wednesday. I am worried that I will find out that sugary cookies and MRE pizza are lethal to wildlife and that by introducing foreign foods to Lantau Island I have destroyed the local ecosystem, but on the other hand the beach had lots of rubbish so I suspect Lantau has already been damaged beyond repair. Aren't we all, eh? Damaged beyond repair. We're all damaged beyond repair. You can't mend people.

Let's try the vegetable cracker. It doesn't sound very appealing. Vegetables are vegetables and crackers are crackers and never the twain shall meet:

At this point I was in no mood to eat a dry cracker, so I took a bite and then threw it away. It didn't taste of much at all. It was a slightly different design to the cracker in Steve1989's meal. His was designed to break into four fingers, mine was just a big cracker.

I kept the cheese spread for later, and after carefully packing the plastic wrappers into the MRE bag - take only photographs, leave only footprints - I staggered up a bunch of rocky steps and then walked back to the bus stop and went back to Tung Chung.

Tung Chung, which is essentially the gateway to Lantau - you get off the MTR and get on a bus to explore the rest of the island

I necked down some Pocari sweat and made my way back to Kowloon on the MTR. In the end I put the cheese spread over some McDonalds fries, thus making cheesy chips. When people ask me what I ate in Hong Kong I tell them I gorged on street food in between trips to La Vache, and I was treated to some home cooking from friends of mine in Fanling, but in reality it was McDonald's five times a day 24/7 because Hong Kong's Big Mac index is highly favourable. As long as you promise to keep quiet no-one need ever know. I wonder if there's a connection between my prodigious McDonald's intake and the difficulty I experienced hiking in what were pretty mild conditions. Surely not.

In summary MRE Menu 23 is disappointing. The cherry cobbler is nice. The cookie has nothing wrong with it, but it's just a big cookie. The vegetable crackers are bland, and the pizza itself is a thick doughy pizza-flavoured slab of bread with pizza topping. I think the problem is that pizza's appeal comes from the mixture of melted fat and melted cheese, but neither of those things can be preserved, so MRE Pizza is doomed to be a compromise.

Perhaps if they included a sachet of cheesy sauce that you could soak into the pizza to give it moisture it wouldn't be so bad. But they don't, so MRE pizza is essentially a novelty. It might be more palatable if you were in a cold weather climate - Norwegian MREs have had pizza for several years, and their pizza looks nicer - but not on Lantau island at the beginning of Hong Kong's autumn, the end.

Kowloon Walled City Park

Let's visit the Kowloon Walled City Park, a small park in north-eastern Kowloon, Hong Kong. It's named after the Kowloon Walled City, a densely-populated city block that existed on the site until it was demolished in 1994. During the 1980s around 40,000 people lived there, in a thirteen-storey shanty town that had the footprint of a couple of football pitches.

The walled city was famous for its narrow alleys and its unusual political setup. In 1898 the British Empire took over Hong Kong's New Territories, but the walled city remained part of China. It was a little Chinese island within Britain's Hong Kong. The Chinese authorities pulled out after a year and the British never tried very hard to police it, so it became a magnet for ne'er-do-wells and businesses that wanted to avoid regulations. It also attracted refugees who were prepared to put up with tiny apartments and poor-quality infrastructure in exchange for cheaper rents than the rest of the Hong Kong. In the 1960s and 1970s the almost total lack of building regulations meant that it expanded upwards, leaving the lower levels shrouded in darkness.

The walled city is generally portrayed in documentaries as a sci-fi dystopia that resembled something from Judge Dredd or the Fallout games. I have no idea what it was like for the people who lived there. By the time I visited in late 2019 it was long-gone.

North-east Kowloon was originally under the flight path of Kai Tak airport, and until Kai Tak was closed in 1998 there were no high-rise buildings. The approach was such that pilots had to make a sharp right turn just before reaching Chequerboard Hill, which is slightly west of the walled city; they didn't go directly overhead, but planespotters brave enough to climb to the top of the city had a great view.

Of television antennas. Antennae. They had a great view of television antennae. Nowadays north-east Kowloon is covered in tower blocks - the former residents of the walled city had to go somewhere - so the park is a little low-rise island in a high-rise world.

The park from the north-east; many years ago there would have been a huge shanty town across the road.

The walled city of the modern popular imagination had a relatively brief history. The original late-1800s-early-1900s shanty town was demolished at the end of the 1930s, and after the Japanese beat away the British at the very end of 1941 the rubble was used to expand Kai Tak airport. In the 1950s thousands of refugees from the Communist regime moved to Hong Kong from mainland China, and in the post-war years the walled city again became a lawless, tax-free magnet for refugees, Triad gangsters, and unlicensed dentists. Mao's Communists continued to uphold China's claim on the walled city, although they didn't push the issue very hard. China's Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s sparked off another wave of refugees.

Such were the extreme living conditions that the walled city became infamous across the world as a hive of scum and villainy. This parliamentary debate from 1974, recorded in Hansard, captures some of the flavour of its reputation at the time:

"LORD KENET: ... Throughout the 6½ acres, the streets or alleys are nowhere more than 3 feet wide. Mostly they are 2 feet wide, in some places they are only 18 inches wide. This in itself is perhaps not too remarkable in an Asian slum, but what is remarkable about the Walled City of Kowloon is that the buildings standing on these 18 inch-wide alleys are 10, 11 and even 13 storeys high.

No wheeled vehicle can get in there - not a lorry, not a car or even a bicycle. Nothing can get in except a pedestrian. The alleyways are unpaved and of earth. Down the middle of each runs an open drain with the sewage running down it, because the site is on a slope; and in the sewage you see very large rats."

Lord Kenet went on to point out that the walled city was popular because average rents were one-third lower than the rest of the Hong Kong. He batted away the suggestion that rents in the rest of Hong Kong were too high, because as a British Lord the suggestion that rents should be made lower was anathema to him.

Hitomi Terasawa, you did a good job.

In 1984 the governments of Britain and China formalised the handover of Hong Kong. This sealed the walled city's fate. The British didn't want to hand over a slum and the Chinese authorities wanted nothing to do with it, so in 1991-1992 it was cleared out and in 1994 it was demolished. The people who lived there had no say in the matter. They might have resisted, but it would have been futile. The walled city wasn't large enough to sustain agriculture and even a small fire would have been disastrous.

A park was built in its place. Chris Patten officially opened it in December 1995. Did it smell? I have no idea. When I was there it didn't smell of anything. It's still hard to think of Chris Patten as a major world figure, but there you go.

When I think of the walled city I think of a maze of wonky corridors, lit by neon, but that version of the city only existed for a few decades. Until the 1960s the walled city was no more slummy than the shanty towns surrounding it; construction didn't really get out of hand until the 1970s. The Hong Kong police greatly reduced the power of the Triads in the 1970s, so by the 1980s its reputation as a cesspit was over-exaggerated. It turns out that all those Hong Kong action films of the 1980s and 1990s with Triad assassins dual-wielding pistols were fiction. The Killer was not an accurate picture of contemporary Hong Kong. I feel betrayed.

I'm not a local and I have no idea what modern-day residents of Hong Kong think of the place. British society exists to benefit landowners and landlords, and throughout British history there have been numerous waves of slum clearances. Every few years a generation of anonymous, voiceless poor people are made homeless, while their former homes are demolished in order to make room for exclusive properties aimed at the wealthy, and if the McMansions fail to sell they are subdivided into houses of multiple occupation. By this process a new set of slums are created.

In contrast the clearance of the walled city seems to have been relatively benign. The residents were offered compensation and were assigned new social houses managed by the Hong Kong authorities. Were they glad to leave? Here in the UK tower blocks tend to be associated with crime and decay, but residents who had been rehoused in tower blocks in the 1960s spoke highly of having plumbing, and heating, and not having to go outdoors to use the toilet. I can't even begin to understand England's history, I am completely out of my depth when it comes to Hong Kong.

What about the park? It has a couple of audio-visual displays that show some of the walled city's history, but this aspect is very low-key - it's more a functioning park than a monument. It has a pleasant bonsai display and in general it's a lovely place to relax. Location-wise it's set back a block from the main road, so it's not too noisy.

I went late in the afternoon and the people were greatly outnumbered by birds. The park also has a baseball court and a sports area off to one side. I saw a turtle and a woman performing tai chi. I photographed the turtle because it asked me to; I didn't photograph the woman because people aren't props.

The turtle.

There is a woman performing tai chi behind that tree.

They have spunk, the people of Hong Kong. They have spunk.

In the streets surrounding the park I saw a golden Range Rover:

It dawned on me that it probably wasn't a good idea to photograph golden Range Rovers in Hong Kong. That street - Hau Wong Road - was full of cars parking next to each other, so either the shopping was good or a bunch of gangsters were torturing someone to death in a back room somewhere, or perhaps it's just that parking is difficult in Kowloon.

Google Street View reveals that Hau Wong Road is always busy, so perhaps it was the shopping after all. Perhaps they just had nowhere to park. The nearest underpass was full of protest stickers:

"Wave upon wave of demented avengers march cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream"

How do you get to the walled city park? North-East Kowloon is an MTR desert where the underground line doesn't go. I popped along to Kowloon Tong MTR in north-central Kowloon and took the 22 bus to Kai Tak airport. The bus goes down Prince Edward Road, which passes the park.

There is a McDonalds a couple of roads along from Hau Wong Road. As mentioned elsewhere in this series of posts the Big Mac Index is very favourable in Hong Kong, so for the entirety of my trip I gorged on Big Macs, sometimes eating three or four in one sitting. It dawned on me that the more Big Macs I ate, the more money I would save, until perhaps I could pay for my trip to Hong Kong by eating Big Macs.

McDonalds does not serve beer in Hong Kong. The local speciality is an unbreaded chicken thigh burger called a GCB, which I think stands for "grilled chicken burger". It was vile. The mouthfeel was like eating internal organs. McDonalds serves breakfast all day long in Hong Kong, but that's probably because Hong Kong is a very busy place, and for people who work the night shift the afternoon is the morning, the end.