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.