At its Height, 50,000 People Lived in the Kowloon Walled City

The infamous Kowloon Walled City has fueled the imagination of many people. Its narrow, dark, and dirty alleyways, where the sun never reached ground level, are probably the closest to a claustrophobic dystopian hellscape that people have ever had to live in.

Yet, it may come as a surprise that, at its height—in the early 1990s, right before its demolition—only 50,000 people lived in the Walled City. In a city of 5.7 million inhabitants in 1990, those 50,000 people did not even represent 1% of the population.

However, to truly understand the horridly cramped conditions those 50,000 people endured, one must bear in mind that the Kowloon Walled City covered only a 26,000 square meter (280,000 square foot) area. That is slightly larger than five football fields.

Fifty thousand people were crammed into an area the size of five football fields. In other words, the Kowloon Walled City had a population density of approximately 1.9 million inhabitants per square kilometer (5 million per square mile).

For comparison, Manhattan has a population density of "only" 29,000 inhabitants per square kilometer (75,000 per square mile). In other words, present-day Manhattan is 67 times less densely populated than the Walled City of Kowloon was at its height.