The colony had a few assets worth noting, however. Its government was stable and orderly, and had attracted a heavy influx of capital from pre-Communist China and the shaky regimes of Southeast Asia. Its banking, shipping and insurance services were the most efficient on the mainland of Asia, and its merchant community had well-cultivated connections with the world market. Its sheltered deep-water harbor was one of the best in Asia.
The colony’s possibilities as a future industrial power were further enhanced by an unlimited supply of cheap labor and the immigration of skilled workers and experienced industrialists from Red China. Its labor unions numbered in the hundreds, but were so weakened by factional fights and political objectives that they were unable to drive a hard bargain in wage negotiations. Under Imperial Preference and the Ottawa Agreements of 1932, colonial products paid a lower tariff rate within the British Commonwealth than their foreign competitors.
Finally, any industry in Hong Kong could rely on one intangible asset of unique value; the character of the average Chinese workman. In most cases he was a refugee, uneducated and penniless but determined to reestablish himself with any job he could find. Having landed a job, he worked at it with a diligence, energy and skill that astounded Western observers.
Although industry had accounted for a very minor part in the colony’s economy before 1951, its beginnings go back to the earliest years. Its first recorded product was the eighty-ton vessel, Celestial, built and launched by Captain John Lamont at East Point, on Hong Kong Island, on February 7, 1843. The California gold rush of 1849 and the Australian gold strike two years later caused a shipping boom in Hong Kong as scores of sailing ships carried Chinese labor to work in the goldfields. Shipbuilding expanded rapidly, a dry dock was constructed on the island and a whole new industry of refitting and supplying ships came into being. A foundry for the casting of ship cannon was established in the same era when cannon were the only valid insurance against South China’s coastal pirates.
A group of ship-repair yards was consolidated in 1863 as the Hong Kong & Whampoa Dock Co., which subsequently sold its Chinese facilities and established its headquarters at Hung Hom, on Kowloon Bay. The Taikoo Dockyard & Engineering Co. began operations at Quarry Bay, on the north shore of Hong Kong island, in 1908. Between them, the two yards have completed nearly 1,400 ships, ranging from large cargo and passenger vessels to light harbor craft. Each company employs about 4,000 men, which is still the largest number employed by any Hong Kong industrialist.
These two companies, equipped to build 10,000-ton ships and capable of repairing practically any ocean liner that enters the harbor, remain the giants of local industry. But where they and about two dozen smaller shipyards employed 28 percent of the colony’s industrial workers in 1938, they now hire around 3 percent. Theirs is not a declining industry, but it has become a hopelessly outnumbered one.
The colony’s oldest export industry has a rather spicy history, antedating the establishment of Hong Kong by at least twenty years. A Cantonese hawker with an eye for trade discovered that the roots of the ginger plant when boiled in syrup had a strong appeal for British traders. Following the line of the most susceptible palates, the merchant, Li Chy, moved his ginger-preserving plant to Hong Kong in 1846. Some helpful soul introduced the product to Queen Victoria, who was so taken with its flavor that she made it a regular dessert at royal banquets, and suggested that it be named the “Cock Brand.” Whether or not the Queen’s intervention actually occurred is open to question, but there is no doubt that preserved ginger became a favorite English and European delicacy. Li Chy’s Chy Loong Co. and a dozen eager imitators kept Caucasian tongues tingling until 1937, when U Tat Chee, the Ginger King, formed a syndicate to standardize quality and prices. During the Korean war, the United States detected a perceptible Marxist taint in the ginger that grew in Red China and banned its importation. A more democratic strain was then planted in the New Territories, and with suitable documentary evidence, permitted to enter the United States. Preserved ginger exports currently bubble along at 225 tons a year, pleasing overseas tastes and being credited by the Chinese with curing the lesser debilities of old age.
Sailing ships were insatiable rope-consumers, and from this demand grew the Hong Kong Rope Manufacturing Co., formed in 1883, and still doing business in Kennedy Town at the west end of Hong Kong Island.
The Green Island Cement Co., founded in Macao and transferred to Hong Kong in 1899, drew most of its raw materials from outside the colony to supply the local building industry. After replacing a kiln and four grinding mills hauled away by the Japanese in World War II, it got back into production in time to ride upward with the postwar building boom.
The Taikoo Sugar Refinery Co., established in 1884, was one of the first local companies to provide houses for its workers. Extensively modernized in 1925, it prospered until the Japanese looted and wrecked its plant so thoroughly that it was unable to resume production until the fall of 1950.