The economy of this staircase town is based on printing. The younger men work on old-fashioned presses in rooms on either side of the steps. The doors are always open, and you can see old presses churning out documents.

Toothless old ladies sit outside on the steps doing piecework, such as tying gold threads on to gift tags. Low overheads? No overheads.

The first crossroads we reach is where the Shing Wong steps cross Bridges Street, site of a polling station where residents vote for the Democratic Party at every election.

It is at this junction that I first saw the ripper, when I moved to the area five years ago. She is a wizened old woman, with a stooped, almost simian posture. She makes a living selling extremely fresh chickens - by which I mean, sometimes still moving. For years, her technique has been as follows.

She pulls a squawking chicken from a wire basket from the ground, and yanks its head backwards with her left hand. She makes a sawing movement with a rather blunt knife across the neck with her right hand. Then she drops the thrashing chicken into a plastic dustbin and clamps a lid on it. The dying fowl runs round and round inside the bucket. As one hurries past, one hears the creature's footsteps speed up as it seeks escape, and slow down, as blood and life drain away.

This awful accelerating-decelerating drumbeat haunted my dreams for a long time. I thought, at first, it was because it was the sound of death. Then, if you'll excuse me becoming a tad philosophical - I realised that it was because it was the sound of life.

As the months went by, the chicken-ripper became lazy, and decided that she could do business more quickly if she prepared her chickens in advance. A few months ago, she started slashing the necks of six chickens at once, and dropping them all into the dustbin.

The tumult in the container as the terrified beasts clawed each other in their death throes was so great that the dustbin would leap around and dance, like a ringing telephone does in a cartoon. The lid would fly off, sending an explosion of blood-spattered feathers soaring into the air.

So great was my distaste for this woman's work, that when I saw an item in the Straits Times recently headlined 'Chicken slaughterer charged with murder' I cheered and clipped it out. The throat-slitter in Singapore had no connection with the woman on the steps in Hong Kong, but I felt it vindicated my feelings.

If you could kill beasts in that way, you could do anything.

Then one day, the chicken-ripper was gone.

The junction became curiously tranquil.

My focus of attention moved a few steps lower down, which was an animal lover's corner. Every day at 8.30am, an eccentric old man appears at this spot with a designer carrier bag. It is full of individually wrapped food parcels.

Suddenly, half a dozen stray cats - his children - appear and line up to be fed.

Let us walk down just a few more steps. Now we are at the most pleasant part of Shing Wong town, a small flat area, often containing one or two camp beds, overhung by beautiful old trees. This is where workers who can't (or won't) pay Hong Kong rents, sleep at night. These are not street sleepers, but working class men. They wear watches and spectacles.

Now the steps reach another intersection, this time with Hollywood Road. We have reached Sheung Wan, the original city of Hong Kong.

At the bottom of the slope is a school, and on the wall, one notices a plaque. This was the site of Central School, partially responsible for the education of Dr Sun Yat-sen, who grew up to become the father of modern China.

As I say, all of human life is here.

One spring morning, I saw the ripper woman again. She was wearing a patch over one eye.

Clearly, one half-decapitated bird had scratched out its revenge before starting its dance of death.