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You know Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more.
What?
You probably won't believe it either.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you.
The guy was a spy.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio podcast.
I'm josh and there's chuck and jerry's here as well, and this is stuff you should know.
So let's get started talking about some stuff that you should know, and i guess we should do our semi-annual explanation.
Chuck that our the title of our podcast is never intended to make you feel bad because you don't know something.
It's not that we think you should know this already.
We're saying we find this really interesting and we want to share it with you.
Hence, we want you to know about it.
You should know about this because it's interesting and we want to tell you about it.
Not that you should already know about it.
Yeah, that's the second one.
We just did that in Listener in the Mail like two weeks ago.
I think we should do it every week.
I'm going to start every podcast with that from now on, okay?
That's a great way to retain listeners, I think.
For sure.
Man, you should see the matcha I'm drinking right now.
It's like mash brown green.
It's disgusting.
I don't know what's wrong with it, but I got to drink it anyway.
Oh, does it not taste good either?
Not really.
It's pretty bitter.
Maybe that matcha's turned, bro.
But does it?
It was powder.
Does matcha turn?
Because if so, I'm drinking turned matcha for sure.
All right.
Well, we'll do a short stuff.
Can a powder turn?
As the powder turns.
Next week.
But no, we're not going to do that today, because we're talking about the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong, which is the most well at one time was the most densely populated place on planet Earth.
And just to give you, if you've ever been to New York City, if you've ever traveled to the East Village, one of my favorite villages.
That's where I got engaged.
Yeah, right there at the museum.
Which one?
New Museum.
Not the Whitney.
No.
That is the most and it doesn't feel like it when you're there, but the East Village is the most densely neighborhood in New York City.
And they have about 43,000 people living in the East Village.
The Kowloon Walled City is about the size of the East Village geographically, but there are 1.
Yeah, that's why they use the East Village in all the comps.
1.25 million people living there as opposed to 43,000.
Okay.
Yes, exactly.
But there were really only 33,000 people.
But if you spread it all out over a square kilometer, you would have that many people to equal that density, right.
That's right.
So I wanted to make sure to take that and just screw it up.
The reason I did that is because it's not the same size.
Kowloon-Weld City is like a fraction of the size of the square kilometer.
Yeah, it's I think like a little over three football fields.
I saw that.
I also saw four.
I also saw four rugby fields or large soccer pitches.
So all those put together.
Imagine 33000 people standing on there, like they literally have to be standing on one of their shoulders.
Who knows how many people deep it would be?
And so this incredibly compact area of a few football fields or rugby or soccer pitches held buildings right up against each other that went all the way up to 14 stories tall.
And if you went into this place, you would be like...
I this is like nowhere I've ever been in the world.
And you would be right, because there was nowhere in the world like the Kowloon walled city from about 1970 to 1990 ish.
Yeah.
Like if you have a, if you have a fairly smallish lot that your house is on.
Let's say you have a single family house and it's on like maybe a half an acre.
If you're lucky, like you're doing pretty great.
That's a great life.
Yeah.
This is a little more than six and a half acres.
And there were 500 buildings packed in there.
Like, even with those mind-blowing stats, it's like, go and look.
There's a very famous photograph from, I think, a 1989 or 1990 National Geographic overhead.
That just gets it all across perfectly.
You just look at it and you're like, that doesn't even look like a village or a city.
It looks like a single thing.
And a lot of people have made that point that, These buildings were so close together.
They were so interconnected.
People just built haphazard bridges between one building and another, so they didn't have to go down 14 stories and then back up.
That essentially created one single organism.
That that's kind of how Kowloon-Wald City came to be seen when it reached its fully developed peak.
Yeah, it had to be the inspiration behind the Living Quarters and Ready Player One.
If you've ever seen that movie or read the book.
When I saw pictures of Kowloon Wall City for the first time I was like oh, looks like Ready Player One.
Oh, really?
Except it was real.
This was an actual real place.
So we encourage you, at some point, when it's safe to do so, to look it up, because the picture is worth a thousand words.
And we spent probably a couple of thousand trying to describe it.
The thing that really rings home, I guess, to me, is comparing it to Blade Runner.
Especially in Blade Runner, when Harrison Ford is eating noodles and Edward James Olmos comes up to take him away.
Uh-huh.
Like just that kind of look like the fluorescent light.
Everything's packed together.
There's people everywhere.
Like, that's what it looked like.
Like there's no way that the designers of Blade Runner did not were not inspired by Kowloon Walled City.
I refuse to believe it.
Well, and as we'll see or I guess I could say it now there have been lots of video games and movies that were based either on or very much patterned after this look.
One of the Black Ops games, this movie about a stray cat or, I'm sorry, a video game about a stray cat.
That may be a movie at some point.
Yeah, I think it was.
This is all to say it was densely packed.
Have we gotten that across?
Yeah.
What was that movie that I told you to watch about the cat, the animated movie about the cat?
And then you said, oh, I already saw it in theaters.
Was it called Flow?
I think that was Flow.
That was so, so great.
That was such a good movie.
I encourage everybody to go watch it.
It's like almost 16 or 8-bit graphic looking.
It's very bit mapped on purpose, and it really does a great job of making it otherworldly.
Yeah, it won the Oscar, and it looks that way because a dude made it in his apartment.
Oh, man, that makes it even better.
That is such an amazing movie.
Yeah, it's really great.
The other movie that sticks out for me when I think of Kowloon Wald City is the Merchant Ivory movie Howard's End.
Right.
Or Far and Away with Nicole Kidman.
Right.
Tom Cruise, that one.
I saw that in the theater for some reason.
Did you really?
That's weird.
I also saw Eyes Wide Shut in the theater, and I knew all about it going into it.
And so it was my birthday, so I made my whole family go watch it.
Oh, that's a very fun end to that story.
Yeah.
All right.
So we need to go back in history, though, if we want to talk about how the city came to be.
And in order to do that, we need to go back to the first opium war, which was A few years between 1839 and 42, where there was a trade dispute between Imperial China and Britain, wherein Britain was like hey, we love shipping in this opium from India to your addicted citizens.
Right.
And China was like, no, we like selling them opium ourselves.
And so let's go to war over that.
I think actually China was executing addicts in the street.
They were on a huge campaign to eradicate opium addiction from their population.
And Britain was like we're going to keep them addicted because we're making tons of cash off of that.
Oh, for sure.
And this is after China had made a ton of money shipping tea.
So there were trade relations already, you know, sort of ensconced.
Yeah.
And Britain couldn't get enough of China's tea.
But China was like we don't really want too much of your stuff, except our population wants the opium you're smuggling in.
So imagine if, like the Juarez cartel, like Mexico, was like nope, we don't want you supplying our population with drugs.
And the wars cartels like, oh, yeah, we're going to war with you and we're going to win.
And now we have a treaty saying that we can sell your population drugs and you can't do anything about it.
That was essentially the first opium war.
Yeah.
And there was even a second opium war, the sequel.
That's right.
But.
Another important thing came out of the first opium war, which was China was forced to cede some land on Hong Kong, which you know wasn't a big bustling place at that point, not much of anything at that point.
And in order to sort of, you know, be close to them and sort of keep an eye on what's going over there, the Qing dynasty said all right, we have a military installation on just across the water from Hong Kong, on the Kowloon Peninsula and over the Kowloon Bay.
And let's build a big wall there and just like fortify this little military installation.
So they built a wall 15 feet thick 13 feet high.
It housed about 150 soldiers.
And that's where the name Kowloon Walled City came from, from that wall.
Yeah.
And today's modern Hong Kong is populated mostly on the Kowloon Peninsula.
But at the time, it was the opposite.
Hong Kong Island was the population.
And this Kowloon place was just a little nowheresville, essentially.
And so China was like, yeah, we're going to keep this.
We're going to keep an eye on the Brits like this.
And after, I guess, the second opium war led to the second convention of Peking, where both the first opium war and the second one found China just giving into tons of demands from the Brits, from the Americans from, I think, the French, who were all like you have to open your markets to us because we want money from you guys.
And one of the things that came out of it was the very famous 99-year lease agreement that the Brits had on Hong Kong from China, which is why the UK administered Hong Kong for almost 100 years, essentially throughout the 20th century.
Yeah, so the other thing land-wise, that came out of that Second Opium War was they ceded all of Hong Kong Island, the entire Kowloon Peninsula, to the Brits.
But keep in mind they still have this walled city kind of right there, you know, nearest to the coast within that territory.
And so there was a little...
I guess a little loophole that they.
I don't know if they snuck it in there, but it was clearly written.
But there was a clause in there.
Basically, that said, it's so confusing I'm not even going to read it.
But the result was this weird small walled city within this territory that Britain now controls was to stay there and to stay that way.
And to stay Chinese territory.
So this little tiny six acre three rugby pitch patch of land would be Chinese sovereign land in this British territory.
Essentially is what just got set up from the 1898 treaty.
All right.
So it's a weird situation, but that's what they're left with.
Right after the British takeover there, some Christian missionaries went in.
It started to get populated.
The walled city did.
They built a church.
Yeah.
Some pig farmers came in.
They started squatting.
People started squatting because you know it was protected by this great.
You know not, I'm sorry, not the Great Wall, a great wall.
That was when we were in Belize on vacation.
We went up a Rio Grande.
Emily kept saying, you go up the Rio Grande to get to the ocean.
And I was like, I don't think it's the Rio Grande.
And it was it was Rio Grande.
But so the joke for the rest of the trip was we're going up a Rio Grande.
Very cute.
So there was a great wall.
So that attracted squatters.
It did.
And one of the reasons why is because there was this idea that, OK, this is Chinese territory.
So that was already kind of a thought in people's head that there weren't enough people there.
And this Christian missionary church kind of, were almost keeping an eye on things.
As far as the Brits administering Hong Kong were concerned.
So they weren't paying much attention to it.
And then World War II came along and Japan occupied big swaths of China, as we talked about in our Unit 731 episode.
And one of those swaths was the peninsula, the Kowloon Peninsula.
And they tore down those thick, thick granite walls and they used it to build out Kai Tak Airport.
And I think it was already there.
It was kind of like an airfield or landing strip.
And they turned it into like an actual airport.
And for many, many years, for decades, Kai Tak Airport was the airport that you flew into when you flew to Hong Kong.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, they need a building.
I love repurposing building materials.
Sure.
So when I heard that part, I was like, that's great.
They don't need that wall there anyway, because it looks like it had a wall filter on it when you looked at it.
Right.
You know, that was kind of the funny thing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Which is ironic because it looks like they populated that city with a wall and then took the wall down.
Yeah.
But it was just so, I mean, everyone knew how far out you could build.
So it just kind of ended up looking that way.
Right.
And it was very densely populated.
That's what I've heard.
So after World War II a couple of things happened geopolitically that kind of gave rise to the Kowloon walled city.
The name stuck even though it didn't have the walls.
But a lot of the people who were refugees during the war made their way down to the Kowloon Peninsula.
And they were like, we're not Brits.
We're Chinese.
So we're going to start squatting here.
And the Brits were like, no, you know you're not squatting here.
This is not Chinese.
It's ours.
It's part of Hong Kong.
We basically own Hong Kong right now.
So get out.
And they evicted all the squatters in 1948.
By this time, there were like thousands of them.
So it was a really big deal.
And then the squatters just came back next week.
That's right.
They came back the next week.
They tried to kick him out again.
And there was a riot this time.
And I feel like that's a pretty good time for our first break.
OK, sure.
All right.
We'll be right back.
We went from normal life, healthy child to acute lymphoblastic leukemia or B-cell ALL.
The St.
Jude team came up to get CJ via ambulance.
Shortly after that, I noticed a rainbow.
It meant that there was hope.
We were driving into hope.
To have hope is to have your child healthy and we have that because of St.
Jude.
You can help kids fight childhood cancer.
Please become a St.
Jude Partner in Hope today by visiting musicgives.org.
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You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.
But did you know he was also a spy?
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Our new podcast series.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.
His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.
What?
And he was really good at it.
You probably won't believe it either.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you.
The guy was a spy.
Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman?
And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film.
How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?
The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, so we're back.
Kowloon Walled City, without the wall, is being populated.
They're getting kicked out.
They keep coming back. there was a Chinese civil war following World War Two.
So that was one reason that people, you know, between the communists and the Nationalist Party.
And that was one reason people were starting, you know, to get the heck out of you know in there, I guess.
Yeah.
And in 1949, you know, the communists won.
They declared the People's Republic of China.
And so that's when, in the 1950s, things really kicked off, with refugees trying to get in there and build up up, up.
Yeah.
And if you were a refugee from China, that meant you were probably a nationalist or at the very least, weren't a communist, and you just needed to get out of there.
But you were, as far as you were concerned, better off living on this tiny patch of Chinese land, because you still consider yourself a Chinese national.
Then you were trying to assimilate into this British-administered colony that was really Chinese, but the Brits didn't treat it like that right.
And so these people, these refugees, became like this... almost like freedom fighters.
And even the CCP, the Chinese communist government, they were promoting them.
They would give them supplies sometimes.
They would give them food.
Sometimes they would send emissaries down that would talk them up and be like keep fighting the good fight.
You know, we've got your back.
And essentially anytime the Brits tried to make a move on these residents of Kowloon Walled City, China would step in and be like uh-uh, that is Chinese territory.
So no matter what these people did, the Brits' hands were tied.
And the whole reason why was not that China cared about them, but it was a thorn in Great Britain's side.
There was this crazy crazy, weird area that they did not have control over, in the middle of this colony that they had taken from China.
And China took every opportunity to basically twist that thorn in their side.
And they used every time that the people of Kowloon were put upon as a chance to step in and flex their whatever authority they did have in the area.
Still,
Yeah.
So as a result of all this, the Brits were like, I don't even care anymore.
Like, this is such a pain.
In the 50s and 60s they took a real hands off approach and just kind of let what happened there happen there.
And that led to a real influx of people.
And then that housing boom.
They, they didn't have it.
Looks like the only building code they have was you can't build anything over 14 stories tall, because it's right there next to the airport.
And you don't want to get a wing through your living room one day.
So that was the only building code around.
Certainly the only one honored.
Because it was kind of anything goes inside there.
And what we ended up with, you know, you mentioned an organic structure.
It was ended up called by architects an organic megastructure.
Sure.
Because these buildings would sink down into their foundation and start to tip, but they would tip over into the next one and that one was tipping toward it.
So they ended up calling like lovers buildings, because at the top they were all kind of angled in and touching one another and it's sort of sweet.
If you think about it, it is.
It is kind of sweet um, that it was also uh, at the same time weirdly, architects in like the 50s and 60s there was kind of like an avant-garde school of thought about just incredibly dense community building.
And this is essentially a natural experiment and it kind of showed that a lot of those theories held up, kind of like the buildings held one another up, that people could just build out what they needed in ways that they needed, in spaces that were livable, without having to be spread out, without having to have government oversight and all that kind of stuff too.
Those buildings especially when they were lover's buildings pressed up against one another, they became so dense that sunlight would not penetrate the street level.
In a lot of cases in most cases actually like one of the premiums.
For a flat in the Kowloon-Wald City was one that was outward facing or faced on the internal courtyard, because they had sun exposure.
Most of the apartments businesses dwellings streets, alleys in Kowloon-Wald City were not exposed to sunlight at any point in the day.
Yeah.
And that you sent this pretty good little YouTube.
It was like 15, 20 minutes long about this walled city that breaks it down.
And at one point I paused it because they had I was wondering what these things cost.
And I don't know what year this was that they gave us these numbers from.
But a 280 square foot flat costs twenty eight thousand American dollars.
And if you're thinking, all right, that 280, 28,000, that kind of makes sense.
But that was without sunlight.
I think the exterior facing 450 square foot flat was $60,000.
Yeah.
And I think that was in the 60s or 70s from a paper I saw.
Okay.
But still, one of the things I saw is that a reason that this was attractive to a lot of people, because over time the place didn't just attract Chinese nationalists and refugees from China.
It attracted people who were like, oh, there's this really cheap living in here.
You could get a flat that was about double the square footage of a government flat, like a council flat.
Public housing, essentially, you'd call it.
And it had a kitchen and a bathroom, and those were not guaranteed in the public housing flats that you would maybe even pay the same or more for.
So there was like real incentive to move into this place if you didn't care about living cheek to jowl with your neighbors amid trash and abandoned appliances and all sorts of other crazy stuff.
Yeah.
Well, there were some benefits, though.
If you lived in the Kowloon Walled City, you didn't pay an electric bill, almost certainly because you probably just like literally ran the electric yourself from the public utilities.
There was all manner of plumbing and wiring required, routed from the outside coming in into the walled city.
So these buildings were wrapped in water pipes and sewage lines and conduit running electricity.
If you were a business, you weren't paying any kind of business taxes.
Right.
So that was a big plus.
But you didn't have stuff like trash pickup and you had to deal with things like heroin dealers and brothels and The triad gang kind of running the show, which you know it was mostly bad, but they also did some some things to keep the place up.
Yeah, a good example that I saw of what life was like in this that made it like people just got used to this stuff and it was every day was that you would when you're walking on street level, you would carry an umbrella because of those exposed pipes.
Right.
It would be leaking on you.
But some of those pipes were also sewage pipes.
So those would be dripping and leaking, too, because there was no code that was being followed.
It was like, I need a sewage outlet coming out of my house here.
So I'm just going to run this pipe right here.
And that's that.
So people just walked around with umbrellas on street level.
Another one that I saw that people just got used to is that a lot of the street level areas were tunnels.
And the reason that they were tunnels is because overhead there was a mesh net that had been laid between buildings to catch the trash that people just threw out of their windows.
Yeah.
And the reason that they put the mesh netting was because if they didn't, then you wouldn't be able to get into the ground floor of any of the buildings because they would be so covered up with trash.
And so these impromptu alleys developed as trash built overhead, and the walls of the first floor of these buildings were exposed on either side.
People just got used to this.
Like this was just what life was like in Kowloon.
And in some ways it wasn't that much worse, if at all, than some of the other poverty stricken areas of Hong Kong at the time.
Yeah.
Like if you're wondering, like, why do people even live there or stay there?
It's for exactly that reason.
You know it wasn't so different from other poor places that it would have been a big like life improvement to move.
And this was their home.
It may look kind of crazy from the outside, but people really made a life there.
There were hundreds of legit businesses that operated there.
There were machine shops.
There were a lot of machine shops as far as industry goes and metal fabrication.
And then food was a big one.
There were lots of food factories and In that documentary they said you know, there was always a feeling that, like some of the food that was made there was in on the plates and in the bowls of some really high class restaurants surrounding them.
Yeah, the fish balls.
So they were unregulated fish balls made in highly unsanitary conditions.
That just made it out of the Kowloon Walled City.
Because that's another thing, too.
A lot of people look at this from the outside and think like this is completely isolated from the rest of Hong Kong.
Absolutely untrue.
Those businesses were exporting out of the city into the rest of Hong Kong.
People were coming from outside of the city into the city for things like dentists and doctors, who are all unlicensed unregulated, which at first blush you're just like oh my God, why would you go to an unlicensed dentist?
Well, they were already trained and licensed in China.
But when they went to Hong Kong, those credentials didn't transfer over.
And so, rather than pay and become a licensed dentist in Hong Kong under British rule, they just set up in Kowloon-Wald City and set up practice without needing a license.
And it was cheaper.
Way cheaper.
There were schools, if you're like, you know, did they even function as like a regular society?
They actually for sure did.
There were kindergartens, there were schools.
A lot of times it was like the Salvation Army or somebody kind of running these things.
If you were like, what about a playground or something like that?
Some of these rooftops had playground equipment where kids could go.
Pigeon racing was a big thing.
So there were gardens on the roofs, the ones that didn't have trash on them.
And they were also keeping these racing pigeons up there.
And, you know, there was actually some order.
It wasn't just like you might picture like constant chaos or something like that.
It was more like something you see at a Blade Runner just a really densely populated city like actually functioning.
They had volunteer fire brigades.
They did.
You know, they didn't have municipal trash collection.
And there was trash all over the place, but they tried.
You know, they had volunteer trash collection teams.
They had night watch teams.
There was a single mail delivery person delivering to the entire city.
So they were functioning.
Yeah, there was officially the Neighborhood Welfare Association.
If you bought or sold a flat, the Neighborhood Welfare Association would witness it.
So it was very much legal.
And then the triads you mentioned, they were manufacturing and selling heroin out of the city.
They were running protection rackets and brothels and child prostitutes and all sorts of terrible stuff.
And then simultaneously, they were also providing the law and order that did exist.
Like, it was not just chaotic anarchy.
It was anarchic in the sense of like government regulation and oversight, like you know, building codes and stuff.
But it's not like you just walked over your neighbor's house and killed them and took their stuff and that was that.
Like there was law and order and it was the rule of the triads who essentially kept people from, I guess, descending into chaos, if that was even a possibility.
Well, they didn't want – it's kind of the rule of the street.
They didn't want real authorities coming in there.
And if it got so bad, that would eventually happen.
Sure.
I mean, I remember when my friend bought his first house in Atlanta in the mid-'90s, in a pretty rough neighborhood.
Like, he got his house broken into and got some stuff stolen.
And the guy that was the big like drug dealer dude in the neighborhood – brought his stuff back and like, knocked on his door and said here's your guitar, here's your amp, here's your stuff.
And he was like, you know, I think the unspoken thing was like, he doesn't want the cops in there.
So he's trying to keep his guys from doing dumb stuff like that to attract attention.
Okay, so yeah, perfect analogy.
That's exactly what the triads were doing in there.
And so yeah, if you just you know, if you wanted to do heroin or something I think it was largely smoked you would come from outside Kowloon Walled City.
Maybe if you liked heroin so much, you'd stick around and move there.
But at the same time, if you were just some elderly person looking for a cheap place to stay that was willing to live in an incredibly dense place, there was room for you there too.
I saw that it was vilified and romanticized, and it really shouldn't be either.
Neither of those should be done to it.
It was, just like every other place, multiple shades of gray.
Literally.
Sure.
It's just that the extremes on either side are so fascinating, especially when the whole spectrum is viewed.
That's what made Kowloon City so remarkable.
Yeah.
Yeah, for sure.
I think that's a great time for a second break.
And we're going to talk about what happened in Catalan City right after this.
We went from normal life, healthy child to acute lymphoblastic leukemia or B cell, ALL.
The St.
Jude team came up to get CJ via ambulance.
It was a little bit of a scary drive.
There was a time where the storms were really heavy.
Shortly after that, I noticed a rainbow.
It meant that there was hope.
We were driving into hope.
St.
Jude gave us a hope that we didn't know was possible.
I truly can't even imagine not having St.
Jude in our lives.
I knew that it was really bad and I had a lot of questions, but I knew that everything was going to be okay.
St.
Jude saved everything that matters to us.
I don't know that we'd have CJ without them.
I am beyond grateful.
My hopes are I could work with St.
Jude.
To have hope is to have St.
Jude.
To have hope is to have your child healthy, and we have that because of St.
Jude.
You can help kids fight childhood cancer.
Please become a St.
Jude Partner in Hope today by visiting musicgives.org.
Big R's big deals of the week are turning up the heat all March long.
Every single week, we're dropping a brand new jaw-dropping deal.
We're talking serious savings on Big R, Senior Feed, black gold performance, dog food, all tough stuff five-quart buckets and more.
But here's the catch.
The item changes every week, and so do the savings.
Shop in-store to snag the deal or skip the hustle and order online with same-day delivery online.
You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG.
But did you know he was also a spy?
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Our new podcast series.
The Secret World of Roald Dahl is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.
His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans.
What?
And he was really good at it.
You probably won't believe it either.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you, the guy was a spy.
Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelts, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman?
And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film.
How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever?
And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?
The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Chuck, we're back.
And I just want to say before I forget again 99 Invisible, of course, did an amazing episode on this back in 2012.
So the great Roman Mars.
Yeah.
And you could be like, oh, that's not what Josh and Chuck said.
They said something different.
Just go with Roman Mars interpretation.
Yeah, I just weirdly texted Roman the other day or yesterday for the first time in a long, long time.
Like weirdly you said something weird.
No, just weird that you brought him up.
That's like twice that he's been mentioned in my life, twice in a couple of days, and it had been a while.
And he didn't text me back yet.
Come on, Roman.
Seriously, Roman, get your act together.
So, yeah, so Kowloon, World City, it's going along.
Most of the stuff we've just talked about, the 14-story buildings, lovers' buildings pressed up against one another, the trash tunnels, all that stuff is really taking place from about 1970 to say 1990 92.
OK, that's like the, the peak of the notoriety and infamy and just the way that people think of Kowloon Walled City.
It was basically between those decades.
Right.
And even before then, even before there were 14 story buildings astonishingly going up in this in the city, the Brits were like we really have hate that Kowloon Walled City is sitting there.
It's just like a thumb in our eye that the Chinese just keep rubbing over and over again.
We really want to get rid of it.
But their hands were tied, essentially.
Despite that, they tried a bunch of different ideas to try to get people out of Kowloon Walled City so they could tear it down.
It was a toe in their tea.
Perfect.
Man, you are on fire today.
I mean, can you imagine anything worse?
A foot in your Brunswick stew.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
With a shoe on and everything.
Good God.
Nice callback.
All right.
So if you don't know what that is everybody, that's going to be a little Easter egg for you one day.
Deep in the Stuff You Should Know archives.
There you go.
Deep in a pot of Brunswick stew.
All right.
In 1962, the Brits started or I'm sorry, they completed construction on a high-rise public housing complex called the Tung Tao Estate.
And they're like, all right, everybody, look what we built for you.
Residents of Kowloon Walled City, Get out of there.
Come on over here.
We want to resettle you.
This is much nicer.
Authorities showed up.
They had notices that they posted and handed people.
And they were met with the Kowloon Walled City Anti-Demolition and Anti-Removal Committee who said no thanks.
We want to stay here.
Yeah.
And so they said, you know what, we're going to tell China on you, essentially.
And China stepped in and was like, no, guys, you're not going to do that.
These people have a right to live here.
This is, quote, a gross violation of China's sovereignty.
And everybody should protest and strike.
And they did.
And the cops came in and there were clashes.
And it became essentially an international scandal that the Brits were picking on these poor people who were squatting in this poor area, in a colony the Brits were administering.
It was not a very good look.
So the Brits backed off.
And it was another chance for China to be like ha ha, we are really using Kowloon Walled City to the maximum effect.
So the Brits who still wanted to tear this down, they went back to the drawing board.
That's right.
But what they knew they had was this 99 year lease.
Yeah.
Signed in 1898.
So you do the math.
1997 was that year on the horizon, just sort of sitting out there.
I would have said 98.
And then the Brits, they knew the state was coming.
China knew this date was coming.
And.
They were like all right, do?
China was like we've been making him and honking about this thing being sovereign.
Like, do we really want this back in 1997?
Do we want to inherit this thing?
And on the Brit side, they were like, aha, like, we know what they're thinking over there.
They don't want to really inherit this thing either.
Yeah.
So they started some sort of more legitimate like agreeing with one another.
As far as talks go as early as like 1986, when China was like maybe we should actually talk this over now.
Yeah, and these were secret talks, right?
So for China, this city had outlived its political usefulness.
And I guess, just as a I mean they wanted to tear it down so badly that the Brits were willing to do this for China shortly before the handover in 1997.
And so what they came up with is that residents would be offered financial compensation pretty good compensation too, I think about 300000 for a flat That again, they'd spent maybe 30000 on 20 years before.
They would be moved into a high-rise public housing unit.
They're basically all going to be resettled into a nicer life gratis with a little spending money.
That's right.
So finally, on January 14th 1987 they got 360 staff members from the clearance and squatter control from Hong Kong.
And they, they came down to Kowloon City and they were like hey, we need to get a, we need to know how many people are here.
We need to know how many people are resettling.
So we need an actual census.
Right.
Like no one has a clue.
We've been guessing how many people live here. based on ordinary numbers.
And this is an ordinary place.
So they cordoned off all 83 entrances and exits to the city, went door to door and did a census and counted people up and said hey, this is the plan moving forward.
You're going to be resettled.
And there wasn't a riot this time.
They were still thinking like oh yeah, we're going to tell China on you, because they didn't know those secret talks had been going on.
This time it was different and the Chinese foreign ministry finally stepped up and, in a formal statement, said in so many words yeah, the time has come and we're giving this over to the British.
They're going to rid this place of its residences, and it was nice while it lasted.
Yeah.
So that was 1987, you said?
It wasn't until 94 that Kowloon-Wald City was finally fully demolished.
And it wasn't until two years before that that the last resident was finally evicted.
There were a few holdouts.
A lot of people were like, yeah, I'll take 300 grand and a new place to live.
There were some holdouts because probably people have guessed this, but we didn't say it overtly.
There there was a tremendous amount of pride among people living in Kowloon City.
They did their home.
Yes.
And it was a very special and unique home.
And they were not going to find that anywhere else on Earth.
And they knew it.
And so a lot of them were holdouts for a very long time and did not want to go.
Yeah.
And I imagine it attracted just like the initial attraction in the 50s and 60s, people that didn't want to be under like the thumb of a government was still sort of a sentiment there.
Yeah.
They didn't want to assimilate to the larger sort of system because they had a system that they felt worked for them, in whatever way that was.
So I have a lot of respect for the people that were like, no, I don't want to leave.
You can't kick me out of my home.
But like you said, sadly, the last person was evicted in 1992.
There were people burning Union Jacks, setting off homemade firecrackers and stuff.
A few people actually physically battled the cops a little bit.
But it wasn't, you know, it was a pretty small resistance.
And in July of 92, the last person left.
Yes.
So there's nothing really left of Kowloon Walled City.
It's just the footprint.
This footprint has been around for hundreds of years and it will not go away.
It's an indelible print on Hong Kong as a town, as an area on the Kowloon Peninsula.
And even the Kai Tak Airport is gone now.
They've moved the airport further away from the city center.
Because like you said, they had to be very careful descending.
We've talked about it before.
I don't remember.
Maybe like our air traffic control episode or something.
Yeah, probably.
Where, like you, basically had to clear the 14-story Walled City and then suddenly drop to hit the runway.
It was really not well planned because there wasn't really a plan.
So they moved the airport.
They got rid of Kowloon Walled City.
And now there's a park there in its place.
Yeah.
And I think they did that documentary say that original religious building is still there is like the only thing that's left from the from the early days.
It was the office of the administrator of the forge.
And yes, it's still there.
They preserved it in the Kowloon Walled City.
That was what that courtyard was.
It was built around that that original office from the I think the Qing Dynasty.
Yeah, that was it.
That's the only thing from the early days that's left.
Like you said, it's a green space.
There's ponds.
It's quite lovely.
They do have a table size scale model of what was there.
But yeah, it's still that same shape.
Like if you do aerial shots You know it's really stuck to their parameters with the city once the walls were gone and with this park is it's the exact same shape still?
And you know, like we mentioned, it's been in a ton of either directly sort of been the setting for movies like in Bloodsport.
Yeah.
From Jean-Claude Van Damme or been like heavily inspired by what the sort of the look they were going after in video games and films.
I don't care what you say.
Bloodsport was a good movie.
You know what?
I didn't see a single Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
I saw a time.
I should.
I'll tell you this off of.
OK.
But anyway, I finally saw Bloodsport when I was not like a couple of years ago, and I was like wow, this movie is actually really good.
I got to check it out.
Oh, you should check it out.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, that's my new deal is Jean-Claude all the way.
Okay.
Okay.
Where's he been?
Remember he had like a podcast or a TV show or something for a little while?
He had a podcast, of course.
Yeah, I think he did.
Did he interview celebrities?
No, I'm sorry.
It was like a TV show where it was a mockumentary or pseudo reality where he played himself but Jean-Claude Van Damme actually was a spy in real life, or something like that.
I haven't heard of that.
I think it was short-lived.
All right.
Well, since Chuck has dedicated himself to watching Jean-Claude Van Damme movies all the time, that means obviously it's time for Listener Mail.
All right.
So this is a rare rebut to a Listener Mail.
So a listener writing in about another Listener Mail because we had our Irish friend write in and point out that we were sort of engaging in Irish erasure.
Right.
So, hey guys, while the emailer was correct that Shackleton was born in County Kildare, Shackleton himself would have considered himself British.
He was born in Ireland while it was under British rule and moved to Great Britain when he was 10.
He served in the British Army and was awarded many British honors.
I myself am a proud Irishman, but I don't think you were wrong in calling him British.
Wow.
I'm happy to accept that that he was correct if there was a quote which shows that he considered himself Irish.
Ireland and nationality is always a tricky subject.
I hold a UK driver's license and an Irish passport.
I have one child technically born in the UK and one born in Ireland, with just 80 miles between the hospitals and them both being on the same island.
Keep up the good work, guys.
Been listening for years and I love the show.
That is from Jamie Finnegan.
And we're not going to wade into this any further, Jamie, because I know that stuff is very tricky.
Yeah.
So we have read the original email and now the rebuttal, and we're going to leave it to you guys to work it out.
Nice.
I think that's a great idea.
And that was from Jamie, right?
Yes, it is.
Okay.
Well, thanks a lot, Jamie.
And if you want to be like Jamie, you can send us an email too.
Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio.
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
We went from normal life, healthy child to acute lymphoblastic leukemia or B cell, ALL.
The St.
Jude team came up to get CJ via ambulance.
It was a little bit of a scary drive.
There was a time where the storms were really heavy.
Shortly after that, I noticed a rainbow.
It meant that there was hope.
We were driving into hope.
St.
Jude gave us a hope that we didn't know was possible.
I truly can't even imagine not having St.
Jude in our lives.
I knew that it was really bad and I had a lot of questions, but I knew that everything was going to be okay.
St.
Jude's saved everything that matters to us.
I don't know that we'd have CJ without them.
I am beyond grateful.
My hopes are I could work with St.
Jude.
To have hope is to have St.
Jude.
To have hope is to have your child healthy, and we have that because of St.
Jude.
You can help kids fight childhood cancer.
Please become a St.
Jude Partner in Hope today by visiting musicgives.org.
Big R's big deals of the week are turning up the heat all March long.
Every single week, we're dropping a brand new jaw-dropping deal.
We're talking serious savings on Big R, Senior Feed, black gold performance, dog food, all tough stuff five-quart buckets and more.
But here's the catch.
The item changes every week, and so do the savings.
Shop in-store to snag the deal or skip the hustle and order online with same-day delivery online or curbside pickup.
Want first dibs?
Follow Big R on social media and be the first to see the big deal before everyone else.
Big R, big deal, big savings every week.
You know Roald Dahl.
He thought up Willy Wonka and the BFG.
But did you know he was a spy?
In the new podcast, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, I'll tell you that story and much, much more.
What?
You probably won't believe it either.
Was this before he wrote his stories?
It must have been.
Okay, I don't think that's true.
I'm telling you.
The guy was a spy.
Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
