Think globalisation, and the first idea that springs to mind is unlikely to be fake mobile phones on sale in a 50-year-old Hong Kong building. Yet the day-to-day business of Chungking Mansions, where people from more than 120 countries mix and mingle, is the true stuff of modern world trade, an anthropologist argues.
'Chungking Mansions is a centre of low-end globalisation - the type that touches most people in the world,' says Professor Gordon Mathews, whose new book Ghetto at the Centre of the World probes the international world inside the five blocks of flats on Nathan Road, Tsim Sha Tsui, that form the mansions.
The professor of anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who first visited them as a traveller in 1983, has spent the past four years recording stories, conversations and experiences inside Chungking Mansions. Although the building may embarrass Hongkongers because of its dubious reputation, Mathews (below right) says it was quite famous and popular with travellers in the 1970s and 1980s.
Around the world, one can find many international neighbourhoods and streets, but to find such a colourful conglomeration of people focused in one place like Chungking is unique, he says.
'It's one building where [the nations] sleep and trade. You can be in it for two weeks and never leave it,' Mathews says.
About 5,000 people call Chungking home; another 10,000 pass through its cheap, rental stalls and shops each day. Goods made on the mainland - some legal and others not - are sold there.
Many of the sellers and buyers are non-local, so these goods may end up in Africa or South Asia. Mathews says: 'We often think about globalisation in terms of rich people and rich companies; in fact, globalisation is really mostly about individual traders bringing back 700 phones in their luggage, or bringing clothing and furniture across borders in containers.'