Walking into the city, you found narrow alleys between the buildings with dripping pipes overhead, discharge flowing in gutters, people stripped to the waist in their underwear working in tiny factories, the sound of metal pounding metal, butchered animals, unlicensed dentists, a two-man rubber plunger factory, carts stacked with steaming food, everything mixed together. It felt unreal (especially in the early days), and yet totally normal to everyone living and working there.

Greg Girard: It was like nothing else in Hong Kong: a mass of interconnected 12- and 14-story buildings forming a single huge structure, its facade glowing from the light of hundreds of apartments and shops. Clearly there was no administrative oversight. It was too dense, too ad-hoc, too unrestrained. All this was clear before even entering the place.

City of Darkness Revisited , by photographers Greg Girard and Ian Lambot, is a revamped version of a book they made in 1993. It serves as a record of life in a place of sensory overload.

In 1993, the Hong Kong government officially slated Kowloon Walled City for demolition, and the eviction process began for its tens of thousands of residents. The city was fully demolished by 1994.

City of Darkness Revisited is a photo book and cultural history of Kowloon Walled City, a largely ungoverned, densely populated enclave within Hong Kong. Originally a military fort, the Walled City saw its population rise dramatically during the second World War. At times, it was an urban settlement; at other times it was controlled by organized crime. But it was always a unique architectural and social phenomenon. At its capacity, it housed approximately 33,000 people, stacked vertically in precarious-looking buildings in an area of less than a tenth of a square mile. Rumors of lawlessness in its interior ran rampant, but its hallways held a complex (and largely peaceful) system of people, businesses, and community resources. In addition to residencies, there were factories, shops, and even community health clinics: the Walled City took care of its own.

Ian Lambot: I arrived in Hong Kong in 1979, and knowledge of the Walled City was far less widespread than it is now. Unless you lived nearby, most people in Hong Kong never mentioned it. It was close to the old airport, so I had seen it from a distance, though in those days it was still surrounded by a large squatter settlement, so its seedy magnificence wasn’t quite so apparent. As soon as I asked my Chinese friends about the place, the stories of its danger poured out, which of course only made it all the more interesting. What spurred me to go out there and photograph it properly was the news in early 1987 that it was to be cleared and demolished. I was doing a lot of architectural photography in those days and initially my thoughts were just to photograph it as an architectural phenomenon that might be of interest to a few architectural magazines. I hadn’t met Greg at this stage and had no thoughts of making a book about it. Greg: I first heard about the Walled City while living in Hong Kong in the early 1980s: a city within a city where the police never ventured. That was one of the rumors. (The part about the police was false, we later discovered.) I had never met a single person who had actually been there, or anyone who could tell me where it was. I “discovered” it one night while photographing near the old international airport, which was located on the edge of a very densely populated part of Kowloon. The Kai Tak airport, which operated from 1925 to 1998, was an important and surreal detail of life in the Walled City. It was known for being difficult to reach, and landing required special training. In order to land, the pilot would have to fly straight toward a mountain; upon sighting an orange-and-white checkerboard painted on the mountainside, the pilot would execute a sharp 47-degree right turn and steady the plane’s course just in time to hit the runway. It was said that passengers in landing planes could see into the apartments of the Walled City.

Ian: Everything in my architectural training had taught me that such a place shouldn’t be possible, but here it was — and by all accounts, on its own terms at least, it worked very well. And of course, unlike all the myths, you quickly realised it was perfectly safe and, as in the rest of Hong Kong, its residents were just ordinary people trying to make a life and a living, albeit in rather extraordinary circumstances. That’s when the idea of making a book about the place first began to emerge. I think we both realized that my architectural photographs and Greg’s people-oriented images worked well together and created something visually more engaging. It certainly helped crystallize in my mind how a book about the life of the city's residents might work. Emmy Lung: I was still a student at the University of Hong Kong when I met Ian. When he came to the University looking for a student for his Walled City project, my professor connected us. I was fascinated with the project and had never been to the Walled City, so it didn't take me too long to commit to his offer.

Ian: Over the summer of 1988 I spoke to a professor of history at Hong Kong University who had been involved in an oral history program with the students there. She introduced me to Emmy Lung, one of those students who had just graduated. Emmy loved the idea of working with these two mad gweilos who were photographing in this dreadful and dangerous place, and became the third member of the team. She was absolutely crucial in finding, talking to, and interviewing residents of the Walled City who were willing to be photographed and tell their story. The more time I spent there the more I started exploring inside. I wandered around the main alleys to begin with, but over time grew bolder and ventured into the darker side alleys and up the stairs — then found the high-level corridors that allowed you to walk across the city without going down to ground level.