Cairns Fencing Quotes

Diamond Hill—what a glorious name for a place. No one outside of Hong Kong would have guessed it was the moniker of a squatter village in Kowloon East. In the fifties and sixties, it was a ghetto with its share of grime and crime, and sleaze oozing from brothels, opium dens, and underground gambling houses. There and then, you found no diamonds but plenty of poor people residing on its muddy slopes. Most refugees from mainland China settled in dumps like this because the rent was dirt cheap. Hong Kong began prospering in the seventies and eighties, and its population exploded, partly due to the continued influx of refugees. Large-scale urbanization and infrastructure development moved at breakneck speed. There was no longer any room for squatter villages or shantytowns. By the late eighties, Diamond Hill was chopped into pieces and demolished bit by bit with the construction of the six-lane Lung Cheung Road in its north, the Tate’s Cairn Tunnel in its northwest, and its namesake subway station in its south. Only its southern tip had survived. More than two hundred families and businesses crammed together in this remnant of Diamond Hill, where the old village’s flavor lingered. Its buildings remained a mishmash of shoddy low-rise brick houses and bungalows, shanties, tin huts, and illegal shelters made of planks and tar paper occupying every nook and cranny. There was not a single thoroughfare wide enough for cars. The only access was by foot using narrow lanes flanked by gutters. The lanes branched out and merged, twisted and turned, and dead-ended at tall fences built to separate the village from the outside world. The village was like a maze. The last of Diamond Hill’s residents were on borrowed time and borrowed land. They had already received eviction notices from the Hong Kong government, and all had made plans for the future. The government promised to compensate longtime residents for vacating the land, but not the new arrivals.