Chungking Mansions

Where it sits. Chungking Mansions occupies 36–44 Nathan Road, on the eastern side of Kowloon's main north–south artery, a hundred metres or so north of Salisbury Road and the harbour. Its neighbours are among the most expensive addresses in Hong Kong: the Peninsula hotel is diagonally opposite, Harbour City and iSquare are within a few minutes' walk, and the entrances to Tsim Sha Tsui MTR station are directly outside. That contrast is the essential fact about the building. Behind a narrow, cluttered street frontage of currency changers and phone stalls sits a seventeen-storey block of five towers, lettered A to E, containing roughly 4,000 residents, dozens of guesthouses, wholesale traders, mosques of use, canteens and shops — an entire parallel economy on some of the priciest land on earth.

How it came about. The building was completed on 11 November 1961, developed by Jaime Tiampo, a Chinese-Filipino immigrant who financed construction by selling strata-title lots off the plan. Many of those buyers were overseas Chinese and South Asian traders, which meant the building was multinational in ownership from its first day and never had a single controlling landlord able to impose one use on it. Tiampo named it after Chongqing, the wartime provisional capital of the Republic of China, deliberately using the old postal spelling because it sat closer to the Cantonese pronunciation. Fragmented ownership is why the place became what it is: hundreds of separate owners, each free to let a flat as a guesthouse, a wholesale office or a workshop. The anthropologist Gordon Mathews, who spent years studying it, called the building a ghetto at the centre of the world and estimated that a substantial share of the mobile phones then in use across sub-Saharan Africa had passed through its trading offices.

On screen. Wong Kar-wai took the building's name for Chungking Express (1994) and shot the first of the film's two stories inside and around it — Takeshi Kaneshiro's lovelorn Cop 223 and Brigitte Lin's drug courier in blonde wig, trench coat and sunglasses, moving through corridors and stairwells that Christopher Doyle photographed handheld and step-printed, so that the crowd smears past while the principals stay sharp. That technique, more than any single shot, is what people remember, and the corridors it was invented for are still there. The film's second story shifts to Central and the Mid-Levels escalator, and the title welds the two halves together: Chungking Mansions plus the Midnight Express snack counter in Lan Kwai Fong. There is a deadpan postscript — in 2009 a small shopping mall was opened inside the complex, reached by its own escalator a few metres north of the main entrance, and named the Chungking Express mall.

What you actually find inside. The ground and first floors are a bazaar: money changers posting rates on paper, SIM-card counters, sari and fabric shops, samosa stands, phone-parts wholesalers. Above that, each of the five blocks has two lifts, one serving odd floors and one even, and the queues for them at busy hours are part of the experience. The guesthouses upstairs are licensed, small and among the cheapest legitimate beds in Hong Kong. The South Asian canteens on the upper floors of several blocks — mess-style rooms serving Pakistani, Indian and Nepali food to a mostly local trade — are the reason many Hong Kong residents come, and are considerably better than the ground-floor tout-driven restaurants. Several African bistros operate here too, and the building functions as a social hub for a number of the city's minority communities.

Its reputation and its reality. A major fire in 1993 and a series of government maintenance orders in 1997 and 1998 forced the owners' committee to act, and the building has been repeatedly overhauled since: public amenity works in 2001, granite flooring on the lower floors in 2004, lift refurbishment in 2005, and in 2010 a full façade renovation costing more than nineteen million Hong Kong dollars, which stripped off the accumulated advertising signs and air-conditioning boxes and added bands of computer-controlled coloured LEDs. Closed-circuit cameras cover every lift lobby. The building's lingering reputation for danger is largely inherited from the 1980s and 1990s; the practical risks today are touts, congestion and the usual pickpocketing of any crowded place.

Getting there and how to visit. Tsim Sha Tsui station sits directly beneath, and East Tsim Sha Tsui connects underground; the Star Ferry pier is a ten-minute walk. Anyone can walk in; there is no gate and no ticket. Go in daylight for the trading floors and in the evening for the canteens, decline the tailor and copy-watch touts politely and keep moving, and treat the upper floors as residential, because they are. Corridors are narrow, lifts are small and crowded, and the lower-floor arcades are congested, all of which make wheelchair access awkward.