Chungking Mansions, the Hong Kong tower Wong Kar-wai filmed that is still open

The doorway is easy to miss, which is part of the point. On Nathan Road (弥敦道, Mídūn Dào) in Tsim Sha Tsui, between a watch shop and a pharmacy lit like an operating theatre, a low arcade opens into Chungking Mansions (重庆大厦, Chóngqìng Dàshà). Step across the threshold and the air changes — cardamom, phone-shop plastic, wet mop water — and the neon of Kowloon narrows to a single corridor of stalls.

The building behind the name

Chungking Mansions is not one tower but five, blocks A through E, stacked seventeen storeys over a two-floor base of shops and finished in 1961. The lower two floors are a bazaar: money changers behind glass, SIM-card counters, luggage, bolts of sari fabric, and the smell of a dozen kitchens working at once. Above them the upper floors hold guesthouses, small trading offices, and a permanent population that the anthropologist Gordon Mathews, in his book on the place, counted as coming from more than a hundred countries.

To find it, take the MTR to Tsim Sha Tsui station and leave by Exit E, which surfaces almost at the entrance at 36–44 Nathan Road. The single fare from Hong Kong station runs about HK$5 to HK$6 on an Octopus card, or you can arrive on foot from the Star Ferry in ten minutes. The ground-floor arcade never quite closes; the money changers thin out after nine, but the curry houses upstairs keep serving past midnight.

What Wong Kar-wai actually filmed

In 1994 Wong Kar-wai (王家卫) shot the first half of Chungking Express (重庆森林, Chóngqìng Sēnlín) in and around these corridors — the smeared, step-printed footage of a cop and a woman in a blonde wig moving through the crowd. The film gave the building a myth it has never quite shaken. What the camera compressed into a blur is, in person, slower and far more ordinary: touts asking if you need a room or a copy watch, a man wheeling a trolley of bottled water, a lift door opening onto the smell of frying onions.

The famous second story — the flat, the Midnight Express snack counter, a shopgirl rearranging a stranger's kitchen — was filmed not here but across the harbour in Central, beside the Mid-Levels escalator. Travellers who arrive expecting that apartment leave puzzled. The building the title names is this one: less a set than a working machine that the film happened to walk through.

Eating on the lower floors

The curry houses are the reason many Hong Kong residents come back. They are tucked up inside the blocks — reached through a specific lift queue, not off the arcade — and the best known have run for decades: the Taj Mahal Club mess on an upper floor, Khyber Pass in Block E. A set meal of dal, a meat curry, rice and naan lands around HK$70 to HK$120, cooked by people who are often from the same regions as the traders downstairs. Order a plate of samosas and a salted lassi and you have eaten better than most of Tsim Sha Tsui for a third of the price.

Down in the arcade the food is faster: momos, biryani by the polystyrene box, sweet chai poured from a height. Nobody minds if you photograph the food; several people will mind if you photograph them, so ask first.

这里的咖喱馆大多藏在楼上，要排电梯才能上去，价格却比楼下街上的餐厅便宜得多。

Sleeping inside the myth

The guesthouses are how most foreigners first hear of the building. They are licensed, tiny, and cheap by Hong Kong's brutal standard: a single room with a private shower runs roughly HK$250 to HK$450 a night, less than a third of what a chain hotel two streets over will ask. Rooms are the size of the bed plus a corridor to the bathroom, the window often opening onto a lightwell rather than the street. What you buy is not comfort but position — a five-minute walk from the harbour, in a building that runs on its own generators and its own logic.

The trade floors between the shops and the guesthouses are worth understanding even if you never do business there. This is one of the places where cheap phones bought up in Shenzhen move on toward West Africa and South Asia, a wholesale crossroads hiding in plain sight. The security cameras added in the 1990s watch all of it; the building today is calmer than its old reputation, patrolled and busy rather than dangerous.

Going, and the one mistake to avoid

Come in the evening, when the arcade is fully lit and the kitchens are working, but come with a plan for dinner rather than a room booked blind — walk the ground floor first, look at two or three guesthouse boards, then decide. The one mistake worth naming is arriving to re-enact the film: the blonde wig, the neon, the apartment. That flat is across the water in Central, and the building itself will not perform for you. Treat it instead as what it is — a curry dinner, a SIM card at honest prices, a bed near the ferry — and it gives back more than the myth promised. Change money at two counters to compare rates before you commit, and carry cash; many of the smallest stalls still prefer it to any code on your phone.