Lin Dai, twenty-six-year-old beauty and box-office queen of the Shaw Brothers studio, took the 1961 best-actress Golden Harvest Award. As the highest-paid star, she earned $42,000 annually on a three-picture-a-year contract. A singer, actress and dancer, she is stunning by any standards, East or West, and the studio plans to release some of her best films in the American art-theater circuit. Thus far, their American audience has been restricted to Chinese-American viewers. The Shaws, who also own studios in Malaya and a chain of 120 theaters in Southeast Asia, began operations in Hong Kong three years after Grandview Film Co. founded the local industry in 1933. After a slow start, the industry boomed in the early 1950s, overexpanded and crashed, leaving only four companies in the field by 1956. Pro-Nationalist studios such as Shaw Brothers have no market in Red China, but there are a number of Hong Kong film-makers who have a pro-Communist slant. Shaw’s new studio can produce wide-screen pictures, overcoming one of the handicaps that has limited the growth of the industry in the colony. Generally speaking, there is still plenty of room for technical and artistic improvement. The 1961 Hong Kong census reported a total of 337,000 women in all the employed forces, yet women have played a disproportionately small part in the direction of industry and public affairs until the last twenty years or so. It is not surprising that Chinese women were excluded from public life, since they had few rights outside their homes until the establishment of the Chinese Republic in 1911. But British women, presumably well-educated and qualified to take executive responsibilities, found few opportunities to do so. The fact that Queen Victoria ruled the colony for the first sixty years of its existence should have helped, but it didn’t. What influence women had was unseen, and was exerted through their husbands or other men. Even today there is not one woman in the top echelon of Hong Kong government, although women constitute about one-twelfth of the government’s Class I and II administrative staff officers (more than a third of these women are Chinese). In nongovernmental posts, there are about ten women conducting their own retail shops, chiefly in fashions, jewelry and objets d’art. Rosalind Henwood, an American, heads an air freight forwarding business.