Taipa and the Firecracker Trade

Firecracker production grew rapidly in Macau from the 1920s, and factories clustered on Taipa. At the trade’s height in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, many Taipa residents held jobs connected with production. Firecrackers were one of Macau’s three major handicraft industries and an important export, so the factory economy reached beyond the walls of any one compound.

The industry joined household earnings to trade moving out of Macau. In Taipa, the work became part of the rhythm of community life: residents knew the factories as employers as well as landmarks. This helps explain why the decline of production is remembered not only as the closing of workshops, but as a change in how island families made a living.

The six Taipa factories had separate histories. Lai Hung Kin’s book, first published by the Cultural Affairs Bureau in 2013 and later expanded in a fourth edition, follows their rise and decline alongside fragments of residents’ lives. It combines documentary research with interviews, bringing factory history and household memory together.

The distinction matters on an island where the industry reached far beyond one factory gate. Firecracker work supported many residents during its peak decades, but the six plants did not share a single start date or end date. Each formed part of a larger industrial landscape, with its own working life and place in Taipa’s memory.

Iec Long opened in 1925 and ended production in 1984. Its nearly six decades span the industry’s growth, its peak in the mid-twentieth century and the years when production was winding down.

The trade disappeared from the island as a source of employment, but its place in community memory remains tied to both the factory landscape and the lives of residents. Lai Hung Kin’s book brings six factory histories together with residents’ memories, placing the industrial scale and the domestic one side by side.