^These apartment high-rises (and other buildings) are near the central zone in Shenzhen, China.
^Shenzen Skyline
^Kowloon Crosswalk
^Pudong Street
^Shenzen Apartments
^Jinhua (China) Workers? Apartments
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The Triads' rule lasted up until the mid-1970s, when a 1973-1974 series of over 3,000 police raids occurred in Kowloon Walled City. With the Triads' power diminished, a strange sort of synergy blossomed, and the Walled City began to grow almost organically, the square buildings folding up into one another as thousands of modifications were made, virtually none by architects, until hundreds of square metres were simply a kind of patchwork monolith. Labyrinthine corridors ran through the monolith, some of those being former streets (at the ground level, and often clogged up with trash), and some of those running through upper floors, practically between buildings. The only rules of construction were twofold: electricity had to be provided to avoid fire, and the buildings could be no more than about fourteen stories high (because of the nearby airport). A mere eight municipal pipes somehow provided water to the entire structure (although more could have come from wells). By the early 1980s, Kowloon Walled City had an estimated population of 35,000 - with a crime rate far below the Hong Kong average, despite the notable lack of any real law enforcement.