Mark Leong Photography

The Mongkok district in Kowloon is one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in the world, and is well known for its underworld-controlled nightlife.

The red focus sensor of a friend's camera lights the face of a wealthy man as he tries on a $6000 J12 Chromatic watch at a launch party for Chanel's new line of titanium ceramic timepieces. The mass influx of Chinese shoppers has bolstered HK's luxury market, but the local elite remain strong.

Central District

A forest of high-rises, mostly public housing projects, covers Kowloon, one of the world’s most crowded pieces of real estate. Despite Hong Kong’s glittery reputation, almost half of its seven million residents live in subsidized housing, with the real estate market pushing apartments beyond middle class affordability. Hong Kong's Gini Coefficient, which measures the gap between wealthy and poor, is the largest among highly developed nations and states. The gap has been widened by the influx of both low-income migrants and multi-millionaires from China.

Wong Tai Sin Temple, a Taoist place of worship known for fortune telling, is popular among Chinese tourists, who make up about 70 percent of the temple’s visitors. The day before the annual Cathay Pacific Hong Kong International Races at the Shatin Horse Track, the temple also draws in many gamblers seeking spiritual guidance to make winning bets.

Hong Kong employs about 300,000 migrant domestic workers, mostly from Indonesia and the Philippines. On Sundays—their only day off—they crowd the Central district and Victoria Park, where here some Indonesian women enjoy their day off under a highway overpass. Political organizers also use Sundays to rally these workers to fight for residency rights.

Before Uber, a taxi driver has several extra mobile phones mounted on his dashboard, connecting him to various dispatching syndicates that book discount fares to undercut the traditional first-come-first-serve rule.

A memorial in Victoria Park following the January 2, 2011, death of long-time political activist Szetoh Wah serves simultaneously as a democracy protest. "Uncle Wah" was a Hong Kong union leader and opponent of British colonial rule who became a vehement critic of the Chinese Communist Party after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. While young people in China barely know what happened then, the Tiananmen crackdown is considered a major part of Hong Kong’s political consciousness. Hong Kong’s demonstrators often think of the Tiananmen protestors and see themselves, as they face increasing restrictions on their freedoms.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company, headquartered in a 1986 Norman Foster-designed post-modern cathedral to capital, is arguably the most powerful corporate institution in the city. Hong Kong's traditionally dominant financial infrastructure continues to thrive as it serves the Chinese investors and institutions that contribute an ever-increasing share to Hong Kong’s wealth and business.

A former factory accountant from northeast China, J currently works in a legal one-woman/one-room brothel on Hong Kong Island. Over the last few years, she has saved enough to buy two apartments back on the mainland, and is now planning to buy another property in Hong Kong.

Industrial/residential street in Kowloon

This retired "red pole" enforcer for Sun Yee On parted ways with the triad peacefully several years ago, but still has the phoenix-tailed dragon tattoo hidden under his shirt. "Back in the old days," he says, "it was all about heart --about righteousness and virtue. Now it more of a business for profit." Gangster activity, though still present in Hong Kong, is decreasing as triads pursue more lucrative activities of varying degrees of legality across the border in China.

Security cameras eye the traffic in Chungking Mansions, a 17-story hive of market stalls, restaurants, and cheap lodging where global traders do business. Indians, Nigerians, and Pakistanis all show up, buying made-in-China goods to sell back home. This block of grungy apartments has been called "the Ghetto at the Center of the World" by Gordon Matthews, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Matthews says that the phone dealers, curry shops, sex workers, flophouse travelers, asylum seekers, and others from over 130 different nations engage in a myriad of daily micro-exchanges that show real world globalization in action.

To commemorate the Tiananmen Square demonstrations 22 years earlier that ended in a bloody crackdown on June 4, 1989, a young artist has invited passers-by to cover him with notes of protest. Most of the messages were directed at the Chinese government and their handpicked Hong Kong leadership, and contained phrases such as “Free China,” “End Totalitarianism,” “Release Activists,” and “Don't Be a Slave—Remember June 4.” China's tolerance was wearing thin, but in 2011, the One Country/Two Systems policy still allowed freedom of expression in Hong Kong.

At Hong Kong Disneyland, the vast majority of park guest are visitors from China.

Beat-up armchairs await residents of an informal settlement built on the top of a factory building. Middle- and working-class Hong Kong residents are feeling the housing squeeze from China on two sides. While wealthy mainland Chinese investors drive up real estate prices, affordable housing grows scarce in one of the world’s most expensive cities. At the same time, Chinese migrant laborers are crossing the increasingly open border to the north, which creates competition even for these dilapidated squatted rooftop units in industrial neighborhoods.

On the wave-sprayed rocks beside Aberdeen Harbor, fishermen and others who work on the ocean have placed figurines of Guan Yin (Kwun Yam), the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, for her protection at sea. Such everyday expressions of traditional Chinese belief in the metaphysical are far more common in Hong Kong than in mainland China, where many "superstitious" folk customs were wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.