Built in 1961 as the district's first high-rise building, it quickly became a rabbit warren of small shops, restaurants and cheap guesthouses, taking over many of the apartments in the three 15-storey towers rising from its two-storey podium. Narrow lightwells pierce the towers. Looking down them is like ''staring into hell'', according to one visitor. You wait five to 10 minutes for one of the tiny lifts. The stairwells are often blocked. In many of the 90 small hotels, ''the sleeper never knows whether it is night or day'', Mathews says. Fire is a constant worry. The building has a reputation as ''a heart of darkness'' where the innocent can disappear. ''As you enter the building, if you are Chinese, you may feel like a member of a minority group and wonder where in the world you are,'' he writes. ''If you are white, you might instinctively clutch your wallet while feeling trepidation and perhaps a touch of First World guilt. If you are a young woman, you may feel … a hundred pairs of male eyes gazing at you.'' Chungking Mansions has a seedy history, quickly becoming a rendezvous for American soldiers on leave from Vietnam with local sex workers, then turning into a flophouse for Western and Japanese hippies in the 1970s, when drug- and gold-smuggling networks were part of the scene. More recently it's been relatively crime free, thanks to the plentiful private security guards and cameras sprinkled around the building (often helping the many illegal workers escape immigration raids). What has become more noticeable is the large fixed and transient population from South Asia and Africa. The building has become ''an alien island of the developing world lying in Hong Kong's heart'', thus raising these fears of ''the other''.

But it is these new inhabitants and their business that give Mathews's new book on Chungking Mansions its importance and its title, Ghetto at the Centre of the World. The building is the centre of a trading network of global importance, one we should appreciate for the far-reaching changes being worked in the formerly ''dark'' areas of international capitalism. Mathews estimates, from adding up the sales volume of individual mobile phone shops (totalling 1.6 million handsets a month when he did his research three years ago), that at least 20 per cent of the mobiles in use in sub-Saharan Africa have passed through Chungking Mansions. ''Low-end globalisation,'' Mathews calls it. ''It is not the activities of Coca-Cola, Nokia, Sony, McDonald's and other huge corporations with their high-rise offices, batteries of lawyers and vast advertising budgets. Instead it is traders carrying their goods by suitcase, container or truck across continents and borders with minimal interference from legalities and copyrights.'' Traders come from South Asia and increasingly from Africa to Chungking Mansions, because everything is there. Hong Kong gives visa-free entry to people from most countries, with varying lengths of stay. They can stay for little money in a guest-house upstairs, eat African food in one of the unlicensed diners and sip ''tears of the lion'' (Indian-made whisky in Styrofoam cups) with their friends at a grocery downstairs. National enmities are set aside in the pursuit of wealth. Occasionally one gets lucky and finds a local girl who will agree to marry him, ensuring Hong Kong residency. From Chungking Mansions the traders fan out into centres in China such as Guangzhou's Tianxiu Building or Sanyuanli area, home to the city's 20,000 African residents, to the vast wholesale market of Yiwu, inland from Shanghai, or the Kam Tin district in Hong Kong itself, where the territory's deregistered cars are junked for spares. The goods bring a 60 per cent profit back in Nigeria, though half must go in bribes.

Decrepit as it is, Chungking Mansions is too big to redevelop profitably. Chinese centres lure away traders, but once deposits are paid, contracts in China are as worthless as ''toilet paper'' - delivered shoes are too small for African feet, mobile phones quickly fail. Far better to fall back on the enforceable contracts of Hong Kong. So it continues to help put Africa ''on the map again'', connecting the output of China's factories to African consumers at affordable prices. ''Chungking Mansions represents a Grand Central Station in the passage of globalised goods from China to the developing world at large,'' Mathews said. Hong Kong is perhaps the only part of the rich world that pursues neo-liberalism to the extent of free movement of people. Most of the traders coming to Chungking Mansions would be turned back if they arrived without visas at the borders of countries like Australia. It's a building of the global periphery within a city of the rich core, an isolated experiment. As Malinowski wrote: ''There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added at once, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.'' Today he would credit his ''savage'' subjects of study with the commercial impulse too. Ghetto at the Centre of the World is published by University of Chicago Press.

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