Chungking Mansions

Ewwww.

Guests at the Chungking Mansions hostel complained about a bad smell coming from a room. Staff called the cops, who in turn called the fire department. When they broke in they found two bodies that had been dead for a day or two.

Swell.

Chungking Mansions has a history of violence and is regarded as a fire trap.

Consider this article from a now-defunct web site:

For hardened backpackers, budget travellers and third-world traders, Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions needs little introduction.

But the uninitiated should take note. The health warning preface from the Lonely Planet travel guide — "Take a look down the light wells off the D-Block stairs for a vision of Hell" — is no idle warning.

"The mansions" is a shuddering collection of some 920 guesthouses, hostels, shops, restaurants, flats and factories crammed into an aging 17-storey tenement. By reputation it's a place you can satisfy almost any vice.

"Its good side? There ain't none," says Bradd Barnes, a British guest in a squalid A-Block dormitory. "I suppose you could say it's cheap, but that's about it really."

For more than 30 years the mansions has been a magnet to legions of the lowest budget arrivals to Hong Kong.

Enter its corridors past the touts, hustlers and queues for lifts and you join a menagerie of humanity jostling for position in a world of unadulterated southern Chinese capitalism.

"There's people who are illegal immigrants, people who are overstayers, people involved in import and export businesses ... of a dubious nature I would imagine half of them," said Eileen Healy, a Scottish resident in a 16th floor hostel.

It's late at night that the more sinister side of Chungking Mansions emerges as gangs of Asian and African youths gather around lift entrances, and shadowy figures lurk along "dildo alley" — an arcade where vendors sell porn.

Residents say drugs and prostitution are today's problems, but the mansions' real notoriety stems from its days as the centre of a gold-smuggling trade to Nepal.

"You were given a gold bar and a condom and told to go into the toilet and see what you could do," a former resident explained.

But that's Chungking Mansions. A place where the concept of 'no pain, no gain' is almost a creed.

Police admit crime is a problem, but incidents are mostly low-level, despite the dominant presence in the area of Hong Kong's biggest triad gang, the Sun Yee On.

"They seem to leave chungking alone. There's a bit of drugs going on but it's mostly petty crimes such as theft," a senior police officer said.

"There's still a lot of drug-taking going on here," comments a long-term guest. "As far as prostitution is concerned they did clean it up a little, maybe for just a while ... but you can't really clean up Chungking Mansions can you ..."

In January, two Indian businessmen were robbed of US $200,000 in cash. They were pistol-whipped and tied up at gunpoint by two men. In March a hostel employee was stabbed to death in an alleged revenge attack.

Would you stay there?

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