Popular belief has it that to find the dispossessed who have come to Hong Kong to flee political or religious persecution, the best place to look is the crowded streets of Kowloon.
A word in the right ear in Yau Ma Tei, Jordan, or the infamous Chungking Mansions can gain you access to a thousand stories of political turmoil and brutality spanning the globe.
However, of the city's roughly 7,000 asylum seekers, torture claimants and refugees, at most 1,000 live in Kowloon or Hong Kong Island. According to Cosmo Beatson, co-ordinator of NGO Vision First which works with those seeking refuge, the majority live a meagre existence in shanty towns dotted across the New Territories. Around Yuen Long, Tuen Mun, Fanling and Sheung Shui, pockets of Somalis, Sri Lankans and Pakistanis can be found living in makeshift shacks.
The reasons are simple: the rent is lower and landlords are less rigorous about ID checks and down payments, normally a necessity in Hong Kong, where torture claimants cannot work. They are given a bag of food every 10 days and HK$1,000 monthly rent allowance from International Social Services. NGOs like Vision First help to provide medicine, clothing and bus fares to over 300 claimants. Still, the problem of how to pay for electricity, gas and basic goods weighs on them constantly.
A prime example is the community of around 50 young Bangledeshi men living in the village of Ping Che, near Fanling. The men, who are all claiming they were victims of torture in their home country, pay around HK$1,000 for rent a month each for roughly built, legally questionable shacks.
'He has air-con but cannot [turn it] on,' says one of them, Samim, gesturing to Uzzal, a fellow torture claimant, as the temperature hits 32 degrees Celsius. 'Because of electricity, if the air-con is on he has to count 300, 400 dollars more a month.'