Grass, flowers and trees sprout on a pleasant park in Kowloon City in the heart of Hong Kong. A place for strollers, gossipers and practitioners of tai-chi (shadow boxing).

Hard to believe that not so long ago the site of these gardens was one of the most notorious corners of the Orient, an astonishing anomaly and a source of friction between China and Britain.

Here stand Kowloon Walled City, also known as Hak Nam, City of Darkness. More than 30,000 people lived in squalid tenements squeezed into an area 200 meters by 100 meters.

You may have glimpsed the Walled City in such films as Blood Sport (starring Jean Claude Van Damme) or Crime Story (with Jackie Chan).

Not only was it difficult to locate anyone in the warren of narrow streets but the inmates were ready to do battle with any outsiders who thought to establish their jurisdiction within these fetid acres.

Crime flourished and the Triads made the place their stronghold, operating brothls, opium divans and gambling dens.

A man could be killed here without the British colonial authorities ever hearing about it. Sending the police in force was enough to provoke a riot and more than once the British had to back down when faced with the anger of the Walled City inmates.

They were backed by the Beijing government. For China claimed that the territory was historically part of the Middle Kingdom and no gwei-loh (foreign devil) legal arguments could change that.

The Walled City with its massive ramparts was a Chinese garrison city when in 1898 China leased the surrounding area, the New Territories, to British colonizers for 99 years.

China insured that, under the treaty, it still exercised jurisprudence over the Walled City and whenever the British tried to impede their residents threatened to turn the attempt into a diplomatic incident.

During the Japanese occupation of 1941-45 the enclave's walls were torn down and the stone used to extend the nearby Kai Tak airfield. After the war thousands of desperate refugees stolen in, building scores of illegal tenements. Anarchy rule and the police had to adopt hands-off tactics because of the imprecise political situation.

Visiting this bizarre enclave was not advisable unless you were in the company of a local. I went there a couple of times, an eerie experience as I stumbled along dark alleyways. Overhead, balconies almost touched, effectively blotting out any view of the sky.

Unregistered workshops and tiny shops flourished in this labyrinth. Dentists and doctors offered their services, without any recognized qualifications.

Only in the 1970s did a series of big police raids bring some sort of law to this urban jungle.

Finally, when Britain agreed to return Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, Beijing allowed the clearing of the site and the buildings were demolished in 1993. In its place traditional Chinese gardens were created at a cost of nearly US $ 10 million.

Hong Kong's last British governor, Chris Patten, formally opened the 31,000-square-meter (6.5-acre) Walled City Park in 1995.

Today, where the sun never reached, Triad gangs rule and desperate families struggled to survive, you find a tranquil oasis, of pavilions and terraces, the Chess Garden and the Eight Floral Walks.