Chungking Mansions is seventeen storeys of guesthouses, curry canteens, phone stalls and money changers on Nathan Road. Nobody who has been there would call it stately. The name is not ironic, and it is not a mistake.
The government’s own building register carries 1,219 names containing Mansion. It carries 3,867 containing Building and 3,167 containing House, and it does not distinguish between a tower and a six-floor walk-up, because the Chinese word behind all three does not distinguish either.
The set is what matters, not the word
The interesting part is not that Mansion drifted. It is that a whole vocabulary drifted together, because the Chinese naming set it renders — 大廈, 樓, 苑, 園, 閣, 台, 軒, 廣場 — does not cut the world where English cuts it.
So Garden (550) and Park (177) are not a garden and a park. Court (1,527), Villa (417), Terrace (129) and Heights (115) are near-interchangeable on the register, chosen for how the English sounds against a Chinese name that has already decided what the building is. Palace appears fifteen times.
An English reader sees a category error repeated twenty thousand times. A Cantonese reader sees nothing at all, because nothing is happening: the English is a label on a name that was made somewhere else.
Why this is not a list of mistakes
Hong Kong English is not broken English. It is English wearing Cantonese semantics — a word borrowed, given the scope of the term it stands in for, and then used consistently by seven million people and the government’s own register for a century.
That is not an error. That is how a word changes meaning, and it happens to be documented here in a spreadsheet with 20,056 rows.