IT IS MID-MORNING in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui and a young Nepalese man who is sleeping rough in some of the world's most expensive property is about to get a rude awakening. In the vernacular of estate agents, the empty patch of concrete that for the last few hours has housed the man's cardboard-clad bedroom might be described as 'a ground-level opportunity with a lot of potential'. It might be sold as a 75-square-feet 'street access' site less than a minute from the busiest part of Nathan Road, less than two minutes' walk from the MTR, less than three minutes from the luxury of The Peninsula and less than four minutes from the Star Ferry. Such a site could be expected to fetch about $500,000. But not this site. This so-called site is in a grimy, garbage-strewn alley at the side of Chungking Mansions.
For the still sleeping Nepali, such considerations are of little concern. He doesn't really care that the filthy alley where he sleeps is part of a sprawling series of tenement blocks that are part thriving export centre, part tourist trap, part fire trap, part budget guest house mecca, part seedy brothel and drug-ridden slum. It probably never crosses his mind that Chungking occupies an extraordinary situation, sandwiched between two international class hotels - the Imperial Hotel and the Holiday Inn - and a stone's throw from the soon-to-be-finished, exclusive Titus Square shopping mall that sits below a 30-something storey office tower, from the newly-opened Lane Crawford, from the Tsim Sha Tsui branch of Joyce and from the swankiest of them all, The Peninsula.
He's not concerned that Chungking Mansions, with its notoriously nightmarish lifts, with its dozens of legal and illegal budget guest houses, with its multitude of nationalities and its restaurants and its brothels would probably be knocked down tomorrow if buying it was not such a nightmare simply because it seems to have more owners than it does stairwells. This morning, the young Nepali has got much more pressing matters to think about. This morning, he's being awoken from his alfresco prime-site slumbers by the Tsim Sha Tsiu police.
'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.