'Wake up. Police!' shouts Senior Detective Inspector Ian Hylton of Yau Tsim District Crime Squad. The young man stays motionless, his face hidden behind a long and dirty matted fringe. 'Are you awake?' shouts the detective, shaking him. The man eventually turns a blinking face toward greyish morning light and tries to focus two tired eyes on the three CID officers standing over him.

'I'm a Hong Kong resident,' he mumbles and recites his ID number from memory.

The detectives check his meagre belongings - a plastic bag and a tin - while they radio to check on his ID number. It comes back: he has no record, he is not wanted, he does have residency and the police leave him alone. He's just one of many young Nepali males who make the unwanted bits of Chungking their home. So the detectives, who have bigger fish to catch in this five-block, 17-storey, 900-odd apartment tenement, leave him to prepare himself for another day in Hong Kong's strangest building.

'He's probably a Gurkha Jai, the son of a Gurkha,' says Hylton. 'His dad would have been in the Army here, the wife would have been allowed over for a limited period of time, they would try and coincide that with the birth of a child - and then your kid has right of abode.' As Hylton and his men enter the Mansions - he heads a team that is responsible for 'foreign gangs' operating inside its grimy portals, he insists, 'It's not really that bad a place. If you consider how many people pass though here, how many people live here, the level of crime really is very small.' The Gurkha Jai who flooded back into Hong Kong in the year before the handover to collect their right of abode are becoming 'an increasing problem' in Chungking but Hylton says the real crime problem facing the Mansions comes from gangs of young, male Pakistanis. 'They have been here longer, speak fluent Cantonese, generally have more money and are bigger than the Indians and the Bangledeshis. Often, they don't even live in Chungking but come here because they know they can prey on those weaker than them.' Hylton's team recently arrested a Pakistani gang that will be in court later this year on aggravated robbery charges.

The Pakistanis tend to control 'transportation' in Chungking. Since most of the money made in Chungking is from export, then moving things out - from the export offices on the ground and first floors, and from warehouse apartments down to the ground level - is worth a great deal of money.

As his team moves around the teeming ground and first floor of this cavernous building, Hylton pops in to see different traders who seem genuinly happy to see him. Abdul, the middle-aged Bangladeshi owner of Bismillah Fast Food tells him that, at the moment, there 'are no problems now'.

'Before there were many, many problems,' he says. 'Pakistanis would come and eat and not pay. For two years this went on. But he [Hylton] sorted it out.' He hasn't, he adds, seen the police ' for a long, long time'.

Hylton and his men then head upstairs to D and E Block, 'the nastier parts of the place'. They check on small restaurants that have had robbery or extortion problems, chat to guest house owners, pop in to see a police informer - 'not a very good one,' says Hylton - and conducts a surprise, very unwelcome raid on a Nepali brothel. Chungking's brothels are quite segregated: Nepalis for Nepalis, Indians for Indians, Africans for Africans. 'We will report this,' says Hylton. But he's not really too interested in vice. 'There is nothing you can really do,' he says. 'If there was something we had on any of these people, we could drag them down to the station.' And he points to the scared Nepalis standing apprehensivly inside the squalid apartment split into tiny plywood bedrooms.

CHUNGKING is split into three distinct parts: downstairs is about retail and business, the middle levels are home to restaurants, guest houses and brothels, and the upper storeys are residential. A Block is the best of the five blocks and E Block is the worst. If Chungking is a self-serving town, the ground floor is its shopping centre, closest to the outside world. The first floor is its real market place. It is here that most of the export trade is conducted, that most of the cheap eateries are to be found, that you find life's essentials: the grocers, the Zam Zam Video rental store and the Gujrat International Barber.

Curiously, in such a prime site, the second floor is nearly empty. The Lippo group bought a 60,000-square-foot chunk of Chungking in 1993 for $680 million and divided a section of the first floor and the entire second floor into a shopping podium containing something like 200 300-square-feet stores. And now it's empty? Lippo divert calls to Jardine Fleming - who they say are now in control of the consortium that controls this big bucks attempt to buy into Chungking - and Jardines don't return calls. It seems somebody may be a wee bit embarrassed. 'It is a question of supply and demand,' explains one Indian trader.

'Chungking is not a shopping place. If you look, the amount of people coming here to shop is actually quite small. It is a place of business.' That's a phrase you hear often in Chungking. Despite the consortium's escalator - straight from the Golden Mile to the shops on the first and the second floor - it seems the stigma surrounding Chungking has won the day. Why go shopping in Chungking when you can elsewhere? Mimi Chan sits alone in her wig shop on the ground floor. Surrounding her are wigs of every shape and size. 'Our business has been mainly export, but these days business is not as good as it was. Some people come into Chungking to shop but the vast majority come here for business. Look on the first floor; nearly all the shops there are exporters.' The couple plan to emigrate to California soon. Her son and daughter are both studying in the States.

With her husband, she has rented property since Chungking was built in 1964. Back then, she says, it was very different. 'I remember when it was first built it was a place where movie stars lived.' IT'S LUNCHTIME but in Chungking Mansions, except for the dozens of packed eateries, the concept seems to mean very little. For residents, life goes on at its usual hectic pace. In his busy ground-floor office, property developer Gobind Sakhrani - 'You want to know about Chungking, then ask Gobind.' - certainly shows no intention of stopping for lunch. He might not be Li Ka Shing but he's no pauper. He has been in Hong Kong 17 years, has had an office in Chungking for 14 and owns 25 retail properties on the first floor. On the wall of his cramped office are sketches of glitzy office developments.

'This is a prime site and its potential is huge, but the problem is the owners,' he says. 'There are hundreds of them. And maybe the majority of the people here would like to sell, but some don't, maybe for sentimental reasons, maybe for business reasons. But if one person says no, then that is that.' Between incessant, short and brusque phone conversations, Gobind explains just why so many people do choose to remain in Chungking Mansions. 'There is only one Chungking Mansions, it's unique and things are good here,' he says. It doesn't really matter if the building is dirty or whatever. As long as my place is clean, I can do business here.' Location might be great, but there is one problem. 'The management is very bad here,' he says. 'They are eating up money.' RETIRED tailor Young Kam-gun is standing in the doorway of his 15th-floor flat in C Block that afternoon, boasting that he's the oldest person living in Chungking - he is 70. 'I know everything about the place,' he says.

His flat is old but still has beauty. One room contains tailor's dummies and cloth and some newly-made cushions. The place still has its original bathroom. Back in the mid '60s, the flat would have been quite fancy.

Young came to Hong Kong in 1949 from Beijing and worked as a tailor for Indian millionaire Hari Harilala when he first came to the Mansions in 1965. . Apart for a short spell living in Tokyo - tailoring for Harilala - he has lived at Chungking ever since. His rent was HK$700 for an 800-square-foot apartment. 'In those days, that was an massive amount of money,' he says. In 1977, he bought his first flat for 60,000. In 1991, he bought another for 800,000.

Young remembers Chungking in better days. 'At one time, there were Royal Air Force officers and British Army Colonels living here. It was full of luxury apartments.' The malls downstairs were full of jewellery and tailor shops just like the malls of a luxury hotel.

The slide in Chungking's glamour, according to Young, started with the Vietnam war, when GIs flooded into Chungking. But the place really started changing 'about 20 years ago' when it became more 'international' and the illegal hostels and the prostitutes moved in. The building's profits dropped, says Young. 'These days the whole world knows that Chungking is the cheapest place in Hong Kong, so how can I sell my flat at a good price?' he asks.

Young may be one among many owners unwilling to sell and lose money, but he hasn't stopped buying. He owns three flats: two on the 15th floor of C Block and one on the 10th floor of the same block. The 10th floor flat he rents to a Filipino jazz musician, and his son and daughter-in-law and their eight-year-old son live across the hallway from him. With the boy playing heppily, with the view over the leafy expanse of Signal Hill Gardens and out to the sea and with a refreshing sea breeze blowing through the flat, it easy to forget that you are standing on the 15th floor of Chungking Mansions.

YOUNG'S friendlness conceals much darker problems in Chungking. There is a long-running management battle going on. Young is the vice-chairman of the 9th Managment Committee of the Incorporated Owners Of Chungking Mansions. They are in conflict with the 8th Management Committee of the Incorporated Owners Of Chungking Mansions and the trouble has taken them to court.

When the 8th were in power, they wanted to double the management fee and ask Chungking's 920 property owners to shell out $30,000 each to pay for renovations. The 8th were mostly guest house owners, predominantly mainlanders who had lived in Chungking for less than 15 years. They drafted a five-year plan to modernise the place and started spending money - a new electricity supply, modernised lifts and a new system for cleaning the building. The place had been a filthy fire hazard with an inadequate power supply for the guest houses; now, well, it is not as bad as it was. Chris Patten commended their changes. The problem was how the money was spent, according to Young.

Then came the 9th Committee - voted in 1995 - mainly traders from the ground and first floors, older people who have lived in Chungking for years.

Each management committee is meant to have a tenure of two years. Elections were held at the beginning of this year and the nucleus of the 8th Committee were voted back in. But the 9th refused to give up power. They claim the balloting was not legal.

Ongoing court wrangles in front of the Lands Tribunal make it look as if the 8th will indeed wrest back power and continue improvement plans - which given the warren like, multiple owner nature of Chungking can never be much more than cosmetic.

IT'S NIGHT in Chungking and, to the tune of an Indian movie soundtrack, Johnny Sehrai is patiently waiting for customers in his Indian restaurant, the Sher-E-Punjab on the third floor of Chungking Mansion's B Block. The place is empty apart from two Bangladeshi traders. The British withdrawl, Sehrai says, has been bad for business. 'The British Army would often come here. Sometimes they would come with wives and children; sometimes there would be 20 or 30 of them, drinking pint after pint of beer.' He owns two shops in Chungking. One, a 200-square-foot Indian takeaway on the first floor costs him $26,000 a month. His much bigger third-floor restaurant on the third floor costs $16,000 and was previously a tailor's. Despite the recent drop in business, he says he doesn't expect much change. 'People come here for business, to shop and the dormitory-type accommodation fills a real need.' He is happy here. 'It's a mixed community,' he says, 'a mini-United Nations. As long as the business is okay, then the poeple will stay.' The problems he talks of are familiar ones. 'There have been more and more Nepali children - sons of soldiers - here in the last few years. They don't want to work, they just want to make easy money. They don't cause that much of a problem though. The real problems are the Pakistanis. They break things, take things.' When asked what it is like upstairs at night, he says that these days he never goes upstairs. But he knows that there are all kinds of business' there.

THE MANSION has completed its daily change from a place of business, of tourists and of families to a place of darkness. The light is always dim in Chungking. At night, it gets even darker. You never know quite what you'll see around a corner in Chungking, especially in the upper reaches and at night that feeling grows. On one of the top floors, two young guys - both bare-chested - are sitting on a stairwell. One is smoking ice, while the other stands watch, albeit with very glazed eyes. They look startled at the unexpected company but that doesn't stop the smoking.

Three floors below, an elderly Chinese lady, hair pinned up, stands timidly behind a half-open metal door and calls for her cat. Past her small frame is a sparsely decorated but immaculate flat. Her shouts echo through the dark, dank, stinking stairwells and become more desperate as her feline friend fails to materialise.

Two floors below her, a Nepali man comes out of another very different doorway. A crude sign on the wall says 'Private Residence'. He is swaying, clearly drunk and makes no attempt to close the door behind him. What is inside? 'I don't know. Really, really, I don't know,' he slurs in poor English. Asked if he is a Gurkha, he straightens slightly and smiles, as if something has been sparked in his hazy memory. He says yes and shuffles off down the stairs. Through the open door, a squalid room is lit only by the light from the adjoining hallway.

The light is broken and so is a filthy fan. A mixed group of gaudily dressed woman sit with a couple of beery Bangladeshis on a well-worn wooden cabinets. Round the corner is a hallway containing nine rough plywood doors, some of which are padlocked, some locked from the inside and some wide open. In one room, a seven-strong gang of young Nepali males lounge on two beds drinking beer. 'Hey! You come for sex?' one shouts. 'You'll catch AIDS, man,' another offers helpfully. At the end of the corridor, two girls sit looking bored on two beds. Back in reception, girls idly scrounge cigarettes and say, 'You go with me. Why you no go with me?' Well, for starters, the place stinks.

IT'S EARLY MORNING and a police van pulls up outside Chungking Mansions. Four Emergency Unit officers - two apprehensive and looking little older than teenagers - step out of the wagon, with batons drawn. Another wagon, siren wailing, pulls up and another four officers jump out, more vigerous. When a third wagon carrying another five officers joins them - the group start to look altogether more confidant and run quickly toward Chungking Mansion's E Block.

The problem with raiding Chungking, as any Kowloon cop will tell you, is the lifts. Either you run up the stairs and arrive exhausted or you take the lift, which can only fit six at a time. These officers wait for the lifts. By the time all of them are at the scene of the call-out - the third floor of E Block - there is nothing to find. The doors are closed and the landing is quiet. An officer says they were called to the scene to tackle 'a fight' but says it was a false alarm. Night problems in Chungking tend to fix themselves.

Chuks, an electronic trader, is sitting on the steps by the 24-hour grocery store slugging a beer. He has, he says, been to Chungking 'seven or eight times' in the last ten years. 'I come here for business. What do I think of it? It's a crazy place. I don't like it.' As if to reinforce what he says, a skinhead wearing a walkman stomps around the ground floor shouting garbled abuse in a strong Glaswegian accent. He looks like he's straight out of the movie Trainspotting.

The mini-United Nations gathered at the store - Nepalis, a drunk Thai woman, Africans - ignore the Scotsman. The Chinese shoopkeeper spends the twilight hours cajoling his customers to pay up. He watches everyone. 'Money, money, money,' he says constantly. 'You know, money, money.' The rest of the time he showers his customers with a tirade of abusive Cantonese.

CHUNGKING is quiet at dawn, except for occasional customer looking for beer at the open shop which is still open. The team of cleaners move vast mops over the last 24 hours of accumulated filth around the vast business area of Chungking. Outside, a mountain of rubbish sits stinking in something like a dozen rubbish skips that are being put onto a small convoy of Urban Council rubbish trucks. A gweilo sleeps sitting upright on the steps and is ignored by a group of African males watching the trucks.

Further up the Golden Mile, the women stand on street corners offering last-ditch massages to early morning stragglers. They have the business acumen not to ply their wares outside Chungking Mansions.

THE ground and first floor of Chungking gradually become busy as the morning gets underway. This is Chungking as most of us know it. Tourists mingle gingerly downstairs, multi-ethnic traders sit at desks in watch wholesalers, garment wholesalers and electronic wholesalers. Everyone waits ages for the lifts. Outside the Kashmir Fast food eatery, the owner is hussling all those coming inside in to have breakfast. Although every table is occupied, the Pakistani owner, Kashmir, constantly shifts people, pushes people and bunching people together. Inside, there are something like seven different nationalities.

Japanese, Indians, Europeans, Pakistanis, Nepalis, Afghans and Aricans sit side by side, eating and drinking. Kashmir addresses two Africans in classic pidgin English, the lingua franca of Chungking. 'What you chop chop?' he says to an African. The African looks at a European eating an omlette and toast. 'You chop, chop same same?' says Kashmir. 'Yes, I chop same, same.' Same same, Chungking, same same. And long may it last.