Tang Man-wai slept in a park during last summer's hottest evenings, but he is not homeless. “The park is more comfortable,” says Mr Tang, 60, at his home in Mongkok, one of Hong Kong's busiest districts. “It's less hot and stuffy there.”
He lives on one level of a bunk bed sectioned off by metal mesh, occupying a so-called “cage home” in a small, shabby flat subdivided between 10 men. The landlord has refused to repair a broken air-conditioner.
In a city of office towers and shopping malls, cage homes are a reminder that while Hong Kong has the highest number of billionaires in Asia and is where a flat recently sold for a world-record price of HK$88,000 (US$11,310, €7,750, ￡6,905) a square foot, almost 1.24m people, 18 per cent of the population, live below the poverty line.