Kowloon
Tiger-hunting ground in 1860, world's densest district by 1971 (154,677/km2) — Kowloon was compressed by harbor, mountains, and airport flight paths into the most concentrated human settlement biology has ever measured.
In 1860, the British used Kowloon for tiger-hunting expeditions. By 1971, Mong Kok district had reached 154,677 people per square kilometer — nearly five times Manhattan's density and the highest ever recorded on Earth. The transformation from hunting ground to the world's densest human settlement took roughly ninety years, and the mechanism was pure compression: mountains behind, harbor in front, airport flight path above, nowhere to go but tighter.
The name 'Nine Dragons' traces to 1287, when the child Emperor Bing of the Song Dynasty fled Mongol invasion and took refuge on this peninsula. Counting eight surrounding mountains, a courtier told him: 'You are the ninth dragon.' Britain acquired Kowloon proper after the Second Opium War (Convention of Peking, 1860), when the peninsula's population was 800 people. New Kowloon was leased in 1898 as part of the 99-year New Territories agreement whose expiry triggered the 1997 handover. Nathan Road, Kowloon's commercial spine, was the first road built (1861) and is now the 'Golden Mile' — 3.6 kilometers of retail density that generates some of Asia's highest commercial rents.
Kai Tak Airport's flight path cut directly over Kowloon for decades, imposing strict height limits that forced density to spread horizontally rather than vertically. This constraint created Kowloon's distinctive character: chaotic street-level commercial ecosystems packed into low-rise buildings, culminating in the Kowloon Walled City — 35,000 people in 2.6 hectares, the densest human settlement ever recorded (1.2 million per square kilometer), ungoverned by either Britain or China, yet functionally self-organizing through emergent cooperation. Demolished in 1994, the Walled City remains the extreme demonstration of how organisms under physical constraint develop extraordinary internal density and specialization — a biofilm that self-organized without external governance.
When Kai Tak closed in 1998, height restrictions lifted and modern high-rises transformed the skyline. Kowloon's 2 million residents occupy one of Earth's most expensive real estate markets, connected to Hong Kong Island only by tunnels — no bridges cross the harbor. The peninsula demonstrates that physical constraint does not limit economic output; it concentrates it.