P. Y. Tang, head of the South Sea Textile Manufacturing Co. at Tsuen Wan, is an engineering graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the largest producer of cotton yarn and grey cloth in the colony. His main plant covers nine acres along the waterfront and contains 45,000 spindles and 900 looms. Its employed force numbers 2,100. Tsuen Wan, now an industrial center with more than 60,000 residents, was a village with a few huts and no roads when Mr. Tang erected a pilot plant there in 1948. He had brought 300 technicians and skilled workers, plus his own administrative experience as managing director of the gigantic Ching Foong Cotton Manufacturing Co. in Shanghai and other cities of China. Experience was not enough; Hong Kong had practically nothing to help the mill get started—no cotton, power, spare parts, skilled labor or parallel industries, such as weaving and garment-making, that could use yarn and doth. There was no local market and the humid climate quickly rusted the machinery. Mr. Tang beat the rust problem and shaved his operating costs by keeping the machines in continuous use, running 8,500 hours a year, compared with 3,700 hours a year in German mills and 1,500 hours in English ones. He opened up new markets for his prolific output in Great Britain, the United States, Australia, Africa, and elsewhere. His early sales were made at a loss, but with his markets established and Red China knocked out of the market by the U.N. embargo, South Sea sales and profits soared. The main plant is completely air-conditioned, reducing summer working temperatures by twenty degrees. The spindles and looms, imported from Japan, England, Switzerland and the United States, are the finest obtainable. Much of the carding, combing, and sizing machinery is fully automatic, tended by Chinese girls in their early twenties. Some of the girls appear to be prematurely grey, but it’s nothing more than loose cotton that has settled on their black hair; all wear breathing masks to protect their lungs from floating cotton. Every phase of the operation is under strict quality control, preserving the uniform diameter of the yarn and testing its tensile strength. The South Sea plant sometimes disconcerts visiting textile executives, who expect a Hong Kong textile mill to look like an over-extended cottage industry. What they find here, and in several other Hong Kong mills, is a streamlined efficiency equal to the best in the world.