The industries of the colony, which expanded at a spectacular rate after World War II, could never have survived on sales to the local market. Most of its residents have always been too poor to buy anything more than the simplest necessities of food, clothing and shelter. No tariff wall protects its products from the competition of imported goods, but resentment against the low-wage industries of the colony continually puts up new barriers against Hong Kong products in foreign countries, including the United States. From its thinly populated beginnings, Hong Kong has been transformed into one of the most dangerously overcrowded places on earth, with 1,800 to 2,800 persons jamming every acre of its urban sections. Eighty percent of its population is wedged into an area the size of Rochester, N.Y.—thirty-six square miles. About 325,000 people have no regular housing. They sleep on the sidewalks, or live in firetrap shacks perched on the hillsides or rooftop huts. A soaring birth rate and illegal infiltration of refugees from Red China add nearly 150,000 people a year. Fire is the best-fed menace of contemporary Hong Kong. In the 1950-55 period, flash fires drove 150,000 shack and tenement dwellers out of their homes, racing through congested settlements with the swiftness and savagery of a forest in flames. Tuberculosis attacked the slum-dwellers at the same ruinous pace. No one dares to predict what would happen if one of the colony’s older, dormant scourges—plague or typhus—were to break out again. But the colony found cause for relief and pride when a 1961 cholera scare was halted by free, universal inoculations. More than a century of turmoil and privation has taught the colonists to accept their liabilities and deal with their problems, yet they prefer to dwell on the assets and virtues which have enabled them to endure, and in many cases, to prosper tremendously. Hong Kong harbor has always been the colony’s greatest asset. Of all the world’s harbors, only Rio de Janeiro equals its spacious, magnificent beauty, with its tall green mountains sloping down to deep blue water. Perhaps Rio has a richer contrast of tropical green and blue, but the surface of Hong Kong harbor is so irrepressibly alive with criss-crossing ferry lines, ocean freighters riding in the stream, and tattered junk sails passing freely through the orderly swarm that it never looks the same from one minute to the next and is incapable of monotony.