To say that Chung King Mansions is iconic is possibly an understatement. Delving into it, as this reviewer first did over 30 years ago as a young undergraduate, is still an awesome experience. When attempting to describe it, the word labyrinth always seems to come to mind. For Gordon Mathews it is “a ramshackle building … that is the hub of ‘low-end globalization,’” and the “haunt of South Asian merchants, African entrepreneurs, Indian temporary workers, African and South Asian asylum seekers, and penurious travelers from across the globe” (p. 1). It is a “ghetto,” Mathews tells us, “in the sense that the minority groups who stay there … are to at least some extent economically blocked from Hong Kong as a whole and are socially discriminated against through racism or fear of the developing-world unknown” (p. 15). There are also few buildings in the world that become film stars, but this one did when it figured as the centrepiece of the first part of Wong Kar-wai's modern classic film entitled, almost eponymously, Chungking Express (1994). So in a sense this was a book that was waiting to be written, and Gordon Mathews has done an admirable job of doing so.

The book is prefaced with a “Prelude” constituted by a “Note on Hong Kong.” As we drift away from 1997 into the amnesia of hypermodernity, and as Hong Kong's colonial antecedents fade into the contemporary miasma of consumerist China, such historical reminders become increasingly necessary. The volume is then structured into five chapters: Place, People, Goods, Laws, and Future; an organization which is self-explanatory.

This book is well written and very readable, its disciplinary heart coming from the passages relating the multitude of interviews conducted by Mathews and his assistants with the building's inhabitants. The style, the subject-matter and the author's commitment to his research project make the resulting book a work of enjoyable anthropology. For this book is no arid social scientific study, it is a book written with passion, in which one can sense a real engagement with the building's inhabitants whom the author treats not simply as objects of an anthropological inquiry, but compassionately and non-judgmentally:

While many non-local people first encounter Chungking Mansions through one of its myriad low-priced guesthouses, the building also sees a good deal of trade in commodities of all sorts. As Gordon Mathews pertinently notes, “Chungking Mansions would not exist as a center of low-end globalization were it not for the passage of goods through its corridors” (p. 105), an economic activity amply illustrated by the judicious sprinkling of photographs throughout the book. And economics, the production and movement of goods, the mobility of labour, has everything to do with the three reasons for the existence of Chungking Mansions: “(1) the building's cheapness, (2) the ease of entry into Hong Kong for many in the developing world, and (3) the emergence of south China as a manufacturing powerhouse.” And the building, contrary to dominant local perceptions, is not a “hellhole of danger and vice,” but rather the haven of a “striving middle class of the developing world in South Asia and Africa” (p. 16).

But as the last section heading of the book (“The future of Chungking Mansions / The future of the world”) indicates, the future of Chungking Mansions, this micro-community of “low-end globalization,” is contingent upon China's manufacturing, trading and resource-harnessing interests. As Mathews points out, these futures are fragile and are directly connected to trends in the relationship imbricating China with Africa:

This then is a book not just for the China specialist or the observer of Hong Kong's minorities, but for all those interested in the human impact of the vagaries of the geo-economics of the 21st century.