Mong Kok

Open at half whatever price you are first given. Two rows of stalls run about 1km down the south end of Tung Choi Street, and they usually set up around noon and stay past 11 at night.

Each fish hangs in its own bag of water on the shopfront wall. Several shops cover the whole wall that way, and the same lane sells the tanks, the pumps and the water plants.

This street works for the two weeks before Lunar New Year. Peach branches and kumquat trees go out by the armful, the pavement jams, and prices climb several times over. Outside that window it is a quiet wholesale row of cut flowers and pot plants.

Old men carry their cages here, hang them from the eaves and sit down. The shops sell live grasshoppers by the tub as feed, and the birds take them through the bars from a pair of chopsticks.

Dozens of trainer shops crowd the single block between Argyle Street and Dundas Street. Stock goes out in boxes stacked on the pavement rather than in windows, and the same model priced a few doors apart will not match.

By day this street has nothing to show. Stalls only go up after dark. The open ground by the temple at the north end fills with fortune tellers' tents and singers working through Cantonese opera.

Five halls stand in a row with banyans shading the forecourt. Incense coils hung from the ceiling burn for days and drop ash as they go, and the paper tags beneath each one carry what the giver asked for.

Work here runs from midnight to dawn. The market has held this block since 1913, and the pre-war brick and granite shophouses still stand, shuttered and silent through the day.

Opened in 1930, it is the only pre-war cinema building left in Kowloon. Cantonese opera plays here now, and the front rows sit close enough that the gongs and drums reach you before the words do.

One escalator lifts you four floors without a stop. The upper levels then unwind as a spiral ramp, so you can walk the whole loop down without a step, and if you need a seat in Mong Kok these floors are the easiest place to find one.

An old main road running from Yau Ma Tei up to Mong Kok, lined with kitchenware shops selling cleavers, woks and steamers. Restaurant owners shop here, so much of the stock is at catering scale. A few old pawnbrokers and bridal-wear shops hold on too.

A four-storey corner shophouse of 1931; bone-setting remedies were sold downstairs while the family lived above. Today it is a university's Chinese medicine clinic, and the ground floor is free to look round. Curved balconies wrap the street corner.

Hundreds of jade jewellery stalls crowd a roofed market by Kansu Street in Yau Ma Tei. Many post no prices, so haggling is the rule, and real jadeite needs a certificate you should ask for. Small bangles and pendants are the usual souvenir.

A Taoist temple people visit for their fortunes: shake a bamboo cylinder until one stick drops, then have its number read. A fortune-tellers' arcade beside it holds dozens of stalls, some reading in English. The metro exit is barely a minute off.

A Buddhist nunnery in Diamond Hill, rebuilt in the 1990s after Tang models from timber joined without nails. Nan Lian Garden across the road is free, with a golden pavilion in the middle of its pond. An hour covers both together.

Since the 1990s a park has covered the site of the demolished Kowloon Walled City, a lawless enclave once among the densest on earth. Only one Qing yamen building and the South Gate footings survive, and a bronze model shows the scale. Entry is free.

A street flea market in Sham Shui Po, with cables, chargers, second-hand camera lenses and old phones laid out on pavement stalls. Not every stall is out until the afternoon. The next lanes over are fabric and button streets, and many walk both together.