Au Kwan Cheung

Biography

Au Kwan Cheung was born in Guangzhou in 1947. A knitting machine master, his father had established a factory in Guangzhou in his early years. After settling in Hong Kong in 1949, his father opened a squatter factory to knit cotton cloth at Fuk Wah Street. When Au Kwan Cheung came to Hong Kong to reunite with his father in the early 1950s, he studied at Alliance Primary School in Kowloon Tong. By the time he went to secondary school, he already knew how to repair knitting machines. After completing Form 3, he enrolled in Kowloon Technical School’s part-time evening textile courses while working in the day. In 1969, he started his own business, forming Tai Hing Knitting Factory, Limited (“Tai Hing”) with a friend as his partner. Tai Hing used the latest knitting machines to produce grey fabrics for garment factories using cotton yarns and chemical fibers as raw materials. From an initial 1,000 plus square feet, Tai Hing’s factory expanded quickly, growing to over 5,000 square feet in the 1970s. Learning from foreign magazines, Au Kwan Cheung began to research and develop stretchable fabrics and market it to fashion garment factories at Cheung Sha Wan from 1990 onwards. He had tried to expand his production facilities in Zhongshan and Foshan, but both factories were closed down before the end of the 1990s. In the 2000s, Tai Hing was reorganised as Yat Sun Knitting, gradually transforming itself into a trading company. Au Kwan Cheung planned to wind up the business upon his retirement.