The densest urban area on earth by some counts, with a market for flowers, one for goldfish and one for birds.
Mong Kok has been cited as the most densely populated urban area on earth, at around 130,000 people per square kilometre. Whether it still holds the record depends on how you draw the boundary, but the experience is not in doubt.
It is loud, crowded, neon-lit and entirely functional.
The specialist markets
Hong Kong organises retail by street, and Mong Kok has the best examples.
Flower Market — Flower Market Road, a solid run of florists and plant wholesalers, at its most extraordinary before Chinese New Year, when the whole district fills with peach blossom, kumquat trees and narcissus.
Goldfish Market — Tung Choi Street North, where ornamental fish are sold hanging in plastic bags along shopfronts. Aquarium fish are a serious hobby here and are also kept for feng shui. It is a strange and rather beautiful street.
Yuen Po Street Bird Garden — a Chinese-style garden where men bring their songbirds in bamboo cages to hang on the racks and let them sing together. Live crickets are sold as feed. This is a genuine social tradition and it is quiet, which nothing else in Mong Kok is.
Ladies’ Market on Tung Choi Street — clothing, bags and accessories, aimed at visitors, and the busiest of them.
Sneaker Street — Fa Yuen Street, for trainers.
The neon
Hong Kong’s neon signs were a defining feature of the streetscape and a very large number have been removed since around 2010, when the government began enforcing structural safety rules on projecting signs.
Estimates suggest tens of thousands have gone. Some are preserved in M+. What remains in Mong Kok and Yau Ma Tei is a fraction of what there was, and it is worth looking at now.
Sham Shui Po
North-west of Mong Kok, and covered in its own entry — the electronics and fabric markets, the cheapest excellent food in the city, and the Mei Ho House public housing museum.
The density, and what it means
The reason for it is the same reason Hong Kong looks the way it does: only about a quarter of the land is developed, the rest being country park and steep terrain, and the population lives on what remains.
The consequence is subdivided flats and cage homes — partitioned units of a few square metres, housing over 200,000 people. It is a well-documented and unresolved problem in one of the wealthiest cities in the world.
Practicalities
Mong Kok or Prince Edward MTR. The markets run north from Prince Edward.
Extremely crowded at weekends. Pickpocketing is uncommon but the crowds are dense enough to be worth ordinary care.
