BBC News - Chungking Mansions: Inside Hong Kong's favourite 'ghetto'
"Eyesore, ghetto, jungle, goldmine, little United Nations. These are all words that have been used to describe Chungking Mansions, a building complex that is seen as both a foreign island in Hong Kong and an important part of the Chinese city's identity.
From the outside, Chungking Mansions looks like a single, imposing concrete block - 15 identical residential floors on top of a neon-lit, two-storey mall.
Past the front, it is like a maze - there are in fact five separate blocks, 10 lifts and multiple old, twisting stairwells filled with swathes of electrical cable, crumbling concrete and graffiti in multiple languages.
The complex began life as an upmarket residential estate in the 1960s, but has since become a hub for traders from developing countries, backpackers and asylum seekers in Hong Kong."
I bought a laptop from that Fujitsu shop, and my current Samsung phone from a place opposite..LOL.
I know this place well, having visited HK quite a few times now. Only thing I don't like about the place is all the touts that hang around on Nathan Road at the front, seem to be mostly Indian or Nigerian....."Copy Rolex!, Copy Rolex!", "Hashish!, Hashish!", "A new suit sir?".
"Eyesore, ghetto, jungle, goldmine, little United Nations. These are all words that have been used to describe Chungking Mansions, a building complex that is seen as both a foreign island in Hong Kong and an important part of the Chinese city's identity.
From the outside, Chungking Mansions looks like a single, imposing concrete block - 15 identical residential floors on top of a neon-lit, two-storey mall.
Past the front, it is like a maze - there are in fact five separate blocks, 10 lifts and multiple old, twisting stairwells filled with swathes of electrical cable, crumbling concrete and graffiti in multiple languages.
The complex began life as an upmarket residential estate in the 1960s, but has since become a hub for traders from developing countries, backpackers and asylum seekers in Hong Kong."
I bought a laptop from that Fujitsu shop, and my current Samsung phone from a place opposite..LOL.
I know this place well, having visited HK quite a few times now. Only thing I don't like about the place is all the touts that hang around on Nathan Road at the front, seem to be mostly Indian or Nigerian....."Copy Rolex!, Copy Rolex!", "Hashish!, Hashish!", "A new suit sir?".
