Rat World - The subterranean dwellings of Beijing Picture #Beijing, and a skyline of fancy steel architecture and clouds of smog likely come to mind. But the most fitting metaphor for the city's growing pains may lie beneath its streets: In the past two decades, underground storage basements, parking lots, and air-raid shelters have found new life as apartments, partitioned into untold thousands of cramped, windowless rooms. It's here that many thousands of Beijing's estimated 7 million migrant #laborers make their homes, lured underground by low rents ($100 or less a month) and a better -- if unconventional -- life in the capital. Over the past two years, photojournalist Sim Chi Yin has documented this subterranean world known in the #Chinese media as home of the "rat tribe," recording the odd mix of quaint domesticity that has managed to flourish within the drafty, moldy cells. #Beijingers from every line of work populate these hidden spaces; they are the waiters and hairdressers, fruit-sellers and manicurists of the gilded new capital taking shape above them. Above, 21-year-old Liu Jing sits in her basement apartment in Beijing, #China, April 26, 2011. Jing moved to Beijing from the central province of Henan and now works as a pedicurist in east Beijing. Faced with sky-high property prices, living underground is often the only option for this legion of low-waged #migrant workers, who make up about one-third of Beijing's 20 million people. Source: #FP