20% of all Mobile Phones in Sub-Saharan Africa Passed Through Chungking Mansions

Over the course of decades, Chungking Mansions—a visually conspicuous yet easily overlooked building complex located on Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui—has acquired a unique reputation. As a multicultural melting pot, the building is known as a focal point for Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, and African communities. In fact, locals often dub Chungking Mansions the “unofficial African Quarter.”

Its ties with Africa do not stop there. Chungking Mansions has long been a famous trading epicenter where wholesalers buy second-hand goods in bulk—primarily cheap electronics and mobile phones—to be exported to developing countries. So much so that, after extensive field research conducted between 2007 and 2008, anthropologist Gordon Mathews stated in his 2011 book, Ghetto at the Center of the World, that 20% of all mobile phones in use in Sub-Saharan Africa had passed through Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions.

In other words, according to Mathews, for every five mobile phones used in Sub-Saharan Africa in the 2000s, one had transited through that single building complex in Kowloon, putting Tsim Sha Tsui at the heart of what Mathews coined “low-end globalization.”

However, after China relaxed its visa restrictions in 2010—allowing African entrepreneurs to bypass Hong Kong and buy mobile phones directly from factories in mainland China—the African phone trade in Chungking Mansions steadily declined. By 2026, the number of phones in use in Africa that passed through Chungking Mansions had dropped significantly.