Chungking Mansions: A Miniature Globe, an Urban Laboratory

If Hong Kong can only be seen as a dipole of only tradition and modernity, then Chungking Mansions ((重慶大廈) would be considerd a contradiction to that narrative. Hidden away in the busiest area in Hong Kong, Tsim Sha Tsui, where tourists flock around, the 17 story, five block complex is legendary and synonymous for budget motels, immigrants, good exchange rates, logistic workers, and home to many refugees, immigrants and backpackers. To enter Chungking is to enter, as anthropologist Gordon Mathews famously put it, “a ghetto at the center of the world” — a small continent under one roof where much of the world’s low-capital transnational trade and migration temporarily congregate.

Origins, architecture and the politics of ownership

First completed in 1961, the mansion itself was developed by businessman Jaime Chua Tiampo, and was named after the KMT wartime capital “Chungking”(Chongqing). Tiampo aimed for the building to be used as a shop, yet also as a residential building that spans multiple blocks. Its complicated layout is a mix of podium shops, narrow corridors and complicated life systems with maze-like stairwells. To an outsider, it can feel like navigating through a whole new world, and it can oftentimes feel overwhelming even for locals. The building itself was sold by strata titles to individual owners, creating hundreds and thousands of owens, each with a different share, making any redevelopment or reconstruction difficult. These main factors created the conditions for a distinct, informal immigrant economy to flourish inside Chungking Mansions. 

From an architectural standpoint, the mansion is a brutalist boring block with cookie cutter grid layouts, nothing fancy. But that prosaicness is important, as it allowed for small motel-like guesthouses to take place: small rooms rentable for a night, cheap storage niches, back corridors where goods can be negotiated, and the social infrastructure of low-cost hospitality. Some anthropologists dub this as a morphology, where the mansion can support many micro entrepreneurial activities because of its structure and environment. This is what Mathews and other scholars mean by “low-end globalization”: flows of people and goods that bypass large capital and formal channels, instead relying on small sums, trust networks, and improvisation.

The people and the economies inside: ethnography of mobility

It is important to note that Chunking mansions is not a ‘ghetto’, but is more of an international mixing pot. Guesthouse owners, many South Asian or Pakistani families, act as brokers: renting beds to customers, connecting travelers to phone parts merchants, and sometimes facilitating introductions to freight agents who will ship containers to Lagos, Accra or Kampala. Electronics traders from Pakistan, India and parts of China import low-cost phones and accessories and re-export them to African and South Asian markets; informal money-exchange booths and hawkers facilitate quick remittances and small transactions. For many African and South Asian arrivals Chungking is a necessary stop-over, low cost, information-rich, and networked. Case studies in reporting show traders building trust through repeated small deals until partnerships, and livelihoods. 

Yet this distinctiveness, though special, can also exclude many from formal labour opportunities, especially for the refugees and undocumented immigrants. The Hong Kong government has been known to be restrictive on offering aid towards these groups. Mathews and other anthropologists document how many workers live with uncertainty, including long waiting lines for asylum seekers, denial of visas, and police raids. The anthropological frame here is crucial: Chungking is about adaptive survival strategies in a global economy that is unevenly open.

Reputation and representation: film, media, myth

Wong Kar Wai’s famous Chungking Express (1994) used the buildings and its environment as a symbol of Hong Kong's liminal life. It romanticized the idea of this replacement of the infamous Kowloon Walled city, painting Chunking mansion as a dangerous yet fascinating cosmopolitan city. Wong himself has been on the record of stating the mansion's profound influence when creating the film. Over time, cinema, travel writing and guidebooks amplified an image of Chungking as exotic, edgy, and essential for the intrepid traveler. 

Despite this media fame, locals tend to have another way of looking at things. For locals, Chungking is dangerous, with instances of crime, drug dealing, human trafficking and prostitution industry. For many, they tend to stay away from it as much as possible. Fires over the decades have exposed clear structural issues, and prompted repeated renovations, but even then the building still has its ‘pitfalls’. Ownership is unregulated, investments aren’t constants, and the government has oscillated between regulatory crackdowns and tolerance. It raises questions about housing, migration policy, public safety, and urban redevelopment. Attempts to “clean up” Chungking have to reckon with the livelihoods that would be displaced by wholesale redevelopment; the political economy of any intervention is therefore fraught.

A cultural food hub

Despite these ‘flaws’, the building itself is a food hub. Walk in and you might find the best curry and mango lassi, yet turn the other way and you’ll find traditional nepalese tea and african restaurants like Ghana locals. For locals who live and work here, the food has become a main attraction, cheap, delicious and a source of contact between different cultures. Anthropologists studying Chungking highlight how mundane rituals:  morning tea, negotiating ship-to-ship handoffs, or the overnight guesthouse turnover  become the building’s social norms. 

What Chungking means anthropologically

From an anthropological standpoint, Chungking Mansions is a natural experiment in urban informality, multi-scalar networks, and moral economies. It shows how people stitch livelihoods across legal borders and how place-based infrastructures persist even as technologies change. It exposes the tension between state regulation and everyday survival strategies: policing and safety cannot simply erase the demand for low-cost lodging and small-scale trade. It also reframes migration stories away from victimhood: many who pass through Chungking do so with entrepreneurial intent, leveraging dense social networks to build trust, transact, and sometimes ascend into more formal markets. In short, Chungking is not an anomaly to be removed; it is a vital expression of how globalization looks at ground level — messy, unequal, resilient.