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In 1987 Kowloon Walled City packed 33,000 people into six and a half acres

Ellsworth Toohey
Jul 07, 2026
∙ Paid

Kowloon Walled City — Ian Lambot / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikipedia)

By 1987, Kowloon Walled City held an estimated 33,000 residents on 2.6 hectares — “approximately 1.2 million inhabitants per square kilometer (3 million per square mile),” according to Wikipedia, making it one of the most densely populated places on Earth. The 1898 convention that leased the…

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