A 55,000-spindle cotton mill made a pioneer beginning in 1898, but the unrelieved humidity of the climate damaged its machinery and impaired its efficiency. Stiff competition did the rest and it was out of business before World War II. Flour mills and shell-button factories prospered for a time, then wilted in the heat of competition. As cattle country, Hong Kong is slightly superior to the Sahara Desert. Nevertheless, Sir Patrick Manson, a doctor who specialized in tropical medicine, decided to establish a dairy company in 1886. He leased 330 acres of semi-vertical pasture from the crown and his first herd of 80 cows clambered and skidded around its dizzying slopes for a decade until an epizootic of rinderpest exterminated them. A new herd which soon outgrew its pasturage was stall-fed thereafter, living on fodder grass hand-gathered by patient Chinese women. Today’s herd includes about half the colony’s 3,000 dairy cows and is the chief domestic source of milk and butter. The dairy company has proliferated into a nutritional combine called The Dairy Farm, Ice & Cold Storage Co., which runs a chain of food stores, restaurants, soda fountains and ice and cold storage plants. The match-making industry, dating from 1938, offers a gloomy illustration of Gresham’s Law. Factories were built on Peng Chau, To Kwa Wan in eastern Kowloon and at Yuen Long in the New Territories, turning out tiny, cheap wooden matches. Factory equipment was primitive, wages low and the matches, more often than not, splintery and unpredictable. At its peak in 1947, the industry employed almost 1,000 workers, chiefly women. Then Macao entered the market with still lower wages and skimpier matches. Every box of Macao matches ought to bear the warning: “Take Cover Before Striking Match,” but they far outsell the colony product. They have also done a lot to stimulate the manufacture of low-cost cigarette lighters. Because of the colony’s habitual preoccupation with trade, many of its industries existed for decades without attracting much attention outside their own circle of customers. With the collapse of trade in 1951, they assumed such unexpected importance that they seemed to have been invented for the occasion. Some of them, like the printing and beverage industries, were a century old. Cosmetics, furniture manufacturing and the fabrication of nails and screws dated from the early 1900s. Three industries of considerable importance in the export market—electric batteries and flashlights, rubber footwear, and canned goods—had been around since the 1920s. Enamelware, electro-plating, machinery, tobacco, and motion picture industries appeared during the depression decade, and the leather industry emerged in 1947.