THE NUMBERS GAME

Perhaps more than any other place in Asia, Hong Kong's energy comes from a powerful relationship with the present. The past is always being obliterated and the future is something you worry about when you get there. After several years living in the city, it can be difficult to remember how certain neighbourhoods first appeared; buildings are torn down and new ones go up in the space of months.?

This disorientation becomes a way of life. If you find a good shop or restaurant, it's important to ask for a business card - finding it again by memory, amid the camouflage of neon lights, can prove almost impossible. You learn to feed your spending impulses immediately: chances are that a store will have closed down or changed hands by the time you make it back.?

But if you really want a study in "the power of now", ride the lifts at Chungking Mansions.?

Built in 1961, the building is one of the world's favourite flophouses. A jumping-off point on the hippy trail during the 1960s and 1970s, it became a staple entry in most dog-eared travel guides. Its five connected blocks (A-E) sit clustered like a gigantic decaying tooth on some of the most expensive real estate in the world - the southern end of Hong Kong's ritzy Nathan Road. The complex is a stone's throw away from the Peninsula Hotel and its guesthouses are close to 30 times cheaper than that hotel's most modest rooms. Barnacled with window-mounted air-conditioning units, hung with the grimy signs of defunct businesses, and haphazardly renovated, the building is pushed to the very limits of its capacity - electrically, mechanically and in terms of density.

Old China hands will tell you that Chungking Mansions has lost much of its edgy charm since its lifts were refitted five years ago, a nostalgia that seems more like a death wish when you see what the current elevators have to cope with. At 6pm on a Saturday afternoon, the queues stretch back down Chungking's fluorescent-lit tunnels. There are Indian touts and their Filipina girlfriends, exhausted backpackers, serene middle-aged American couples, don't-mess-with-me Russians and African women in voluminous printed dresses. They could be extras from Blade Runner forced into a fire drill.

At the end of the queue waits an interminable lift journey. The building has 17 floors and the elevators invariably stop at each floor on the way up and down. By the time it has creaked to the top and back, the lift looks like it might die: 10 people cram into a space meant for seven and the overload alarm lets out a mournful electronic bleat. Whereupon a portly Bangladeshi bustles through the doors and wedges himself inside as if he's performing a star jump. The alarm might now be shrieking like a gibbon - but the lift can evidently be tricked into taking more than its legal load.

In these elevators, the future lasts only as long as the ride to the floor you want. After that, the overloading is someone else's problem - until, of course, you want to go back down again.

There are 980 rooms honeycombed throughout Chungking - which means "great (or repeated) good luck" - some of them just big enough for a double bed. The guesthouses are cheap - little more than £10 a night for the most basic - but the shower usually drains directly into the toilet and the decor stretches to large white bathroom tiles on the floors, walls - everywhere. You'd be more comfortable sleeping in your own bathroom.

On any given day, the complex is estimated to be home to 4,000 residents with as many as 10,000 others milling around the scores of tailors and cheap electronic goods shops. It used to be something of a no-go area, a stalking ground for prostitutes, smugglers and drug traffickers, but has since reinvented itself as a chic, if grimy, staging post for holidaymakers to Asia. But gentrification remains a long way off: in Chungking, middle-aged budget travellers rub shoulders with Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants and African traders. There's a feeling that you're not in Hong Kong any more but some kind of globalised souk.