Qingdao, a beautiful coastal city, is one of the cradles for national industry in the contemporary era. In the 1920s, Yin Zhizhong, a person from Shangdong’s Ye County, went to Japan to learn the technique of making needles.

       At the end of 1929, he established Zhongji Needle Manufacturing Factory in Qingdao, which was the first factory that manufactured hand sewing needles. After Yin Zhizhong retired, he established the Jilu Needle-Manufacturing Factory in 1931, which produced 600, 000 hand sewing needles each day. Its products had the trademarks of “Shuangqian”, “Sanjiao”, “Heilong” and “Shiqiu”, and they were sold to the Jiaodong Peninsula and all places in Hebei Province.

       In 1932, Jilu Needle Manufacturing Factory purchased the professional equipment for producing Japanese sewing needles and all the technical materials of making needles’ eyes. It reconstructed the production techniques from production on the three machines of punching the nose, punching and dividing into the production on one machine. After the reconstruction, the equipment was called “Speed machine that integrates three”. It improved the production efficiency, expanded the production scale and increased the original personnel from 69 into 121. Because of this, he was awarded with the first-prize medal launched by Nanjing Government’s actual industrial department and the five-year-long patent right.

       With the efforts of Yin Zhizhong and others, China’s needle-making industry surpassed that of Japan, which caused certain sensation both at home and abroad. In 1933, Zhongji Needle Manufacturing Factory was shut down because of poor operations, and its production equipment was purchased by Jilu Needle Manufacturing Factory. In 1934, Jilu Needle Manufacturing Factory had produced 500 million needles annually. As of the dawn of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, its annual production had reached 1.5 billion, which not only broke the monopoly of Japanese and German needles in the Chinese market, but also were exported to India and the Nanyang Region.

       After the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out, Yin Zhizhong established Dachuan Industrial Company in Chongqing, which included the mechanic, needle-making and asbestos factories, so as to continue its industrial production. Due to his innovative contributions to China’s needle-making industry, Yin Zhizhong is called “King of Making Needles”.