Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a HongKong film released last year, achieved extraordinary popularity and box-office success. This action film, which revolves around gang conflicts in the Kowloon Walled City—a lower-class enclave in 1980s Hong Kong—prompts us to recognize that cultural nostalgia for Hong Kong’s past persists as an undiminished collective sentiment within Sinophone cultures. As eras shift, there is an increasing demand for cultural products to anchor the receding past, allowing audiences to interpret, memorialize, and reflect upon it. Looking back two decades, I contend that Kung Fu Hustle (2004) also leveraged this collective nostalgia to achieve monumental success. Not only did it excel commercially, but it has also been canonized in film history as an unconventional martial arts masterpiece. By subverting the genre’s typical logic of violent conquest, it replaces unjust morality with righteous ethics. Set in 1930s Shanghai, the film opens by reimagining the classic water-dispute scene from the 1950s Shanghai comedy (Huaji Xi) The House of 72 Tenants. However, it diverges from earlier adaptations that foregrounded class struggle. Instead, the lower-class neighborhood Pig Sty Alley embodies a self-sufficient survival logic infused with Foucault’s concept heterotopia, while also constructing a cinematic space of Cantonese verandahs where conflicts unfold. These choices render Shanghai’s setting a mere signifier, shifting the focus to Hong Kong’s own spatial and communal realities.

Thus, in my article I argue that cultural products from Shanghai and Hong Kong often utilize each other's contexts for self-expression, which I term “Intertextual Otherness.” Kung Fu Hustle imagines and reinvents Shanghai by employing and appropriating space as a social indicator within the film. The Cantonese phonetic resonance and shared living conditions between Pig Sty Alley and the Kowloon Walled City transform the latter into a localized projection of Shanghai’s narratives. Kowloon Walled City has long been a favored spatial backdrop in Hong Kong and global cinema, appearing in works like Brothers from the Walled City (1982), Long Arm of the Law (1984), Crime Story (1993), Ghost in the Shell (1995), Batman Begins (2005), and Re-cycle (2006). On one level, it was a survivalist community built by refugees, immigrants, and marginalized groups, comprising over 300 interconnected buildings with labyrinthine architecture. It is a setting ripe for complex narratives due to its unique aesthetic and social ecology. On another level, the demolished Walled City symbolized an authenticity capable of countering urban anxieties in the pre-1997 colonial Hong Kong as a “borrowed time, borrowed space” society. Its nostalgia-laden legacy continues to evoke collective yearning for history, homeland, and the elusive notion of “home.” 

My work seeks to uncover correlations between cultural symbols in mass media and their spatial/architectural implications, probing the intricate cultural formations and emotional undercurrents embedded in urban geography. Submitted at the “Local Cultures-Global Spaces” conference and published in the AMPS Journal, this perspective aims to enrich architectural and spatial studies with cinematic and urbanist frameworks, positioning space as a nuanced cultural process where meaning is continuously forged, contested, and reimagined in a deliberate and serendipitous way.  

Intertextual otherness between Shanghai and Hong Kong: the localisation of space and collective nostalgia in Kung Fu Hustle by Xiaoyu Chen (The University of Edinburgh, UK) is published in Architecture_MPS, volume 30.

Xiaoyu Chen is a graduate student in Science and Technology Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on urban geography, emphasizing the complex dialogues between space, ecology, and technology within the framework of urban political ecology. Her works particularly examine the context of Shanghai in the 19th and 20th centuries, exploring how Shanghai as an atypical colonial and post-colonial city has self-generated within the East Asian context, as well as its role as a global city within the networks of global culture, technology, and politics.

AMPS Kung Fu Hustle Kowloon Walled City nostalgia Hong Kong otherness AMPS blog