the ecstacy still in my spine

"Square buildings folded up into one another as thousands of modifications were made, virtually none by architects or engineers, until hundreds of square metres were simply a kind of patchwork monolith. Labyrinthine corridors ran through the monolith, some of those being former streets (at the ground level, and often clogged up with trash), and some of those running through upper floors, practically between buildings. The streets were illuminated by fluorescent lights, as sunlight was rare except for the rooftops...
...By the early 1980s, Kowloon Walled City had an estimated population of 35,000. Being a lawless land, the city was notorious for its excess of brothels, casinos, opium dens, cocaine parlours, food courts serving dog meat, and secret factories. The Kowloon Walled City was also infamous for its high number of unsanitary dentist clinics, since this was where unlicensed dentists could operate without prosecution....
At that time, it had 50,000 inhabitants on 0.026 km², and therefore a very high population density of 1,900,000 / km². At its height, it was one of the most densely populated urban areas on Earth"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City






http://www.tofu-magazine.net/newVersion/pages/KWC.html


"murky interior... Every nook and cranny within its tiny acreage was expanded out, and crammed into, until its intricate labyrinth of thoroughfares and pathways received not a ray of sunlight, even at high noon. The health authorities kept away. So the City just developed its own legion of ad-hock clinics and dental surgeons. In the absence of telephone and utilities companies the City’s inhabitants just by-wired their own electricity and connections. The same nick-it-yourself approach applied to plumbing and water. As a result a tangled network of pipes and wiring dripped and hissed above the city’s dark, dank walkways...A lone European venturing into its midst would most probably never be seen again, no Chinese went in without appropriate reason...finally evacuate the Walled City’s stubborn population between 1988-92 and then destroy its derelict, decrepit, rat infested shell. It was only in these final years of gradual abandonment that a few journalists, photographers and investigators were able to wander unchallenged, around the Walled City’s uncharted labyrinths"



"Are your brothels full, Oh Babylon, with merry Middlemen?
Never peer out of their periscopes from those deep opium dens
All this death must need a counterweight always someone born again"