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could each build 250,000-tonners like the Esso Northumbria , and one dock each could accommodate a 400,000-ton and a 350,000-ton monster—or any combination of smallervessels that the buyers appeared to need. Three million six hundred and fifty thousand tons of shipping could thus be manufactured at any one time in the Hyundai yards.
    And superquickly, too. From the moment the immense plates of steel were cut in the foundry shops until the moment the dry-dock sluices were opened and the sea waters were allowed to float a new behemoth away, took the Korean workers only nine months. With a further nine months spent in the fitting-out yard, this meant that any new Hyundai vessel took just a year and a half to make. A ship order placed at Hyundai took half the time it would in a European yard—and at a price a good 10 per cent lower than the nearest-priced competition (which happened to be, rubbing in the prosperity of the New Pacific, just across the sea in Japan).
    Eighteen thousand men worked at the Ulsan yard. They worked six days a week. They started at 6.30 a.m. with thirty minutes of compulsory jogging. They then reported for work at the yard at 7.30 a.m., and laboured uncomplainingly until they were allowed home at 5.30 p.m. They had an hour off for lunch—invariably they would be handed a plastic box filled with the mess of Korean pickled cabbage known as kimchi (which now has so much status as the country’s national dish that a museum has been dedicated to it in Seoul). They were permitted two ten-minute breaks, one at ten, the other at three. A worker of average diligence, competence and seniority was paid about £300 a month. (Although, two years later in this story, this sum came to be regarded as so derisory that Korea suffered a period of major industrial unrest, with rashes of strikes and riots, back in 1985, when I made my first visit, the workers seemed docile and content and behaved peaceably enough.)
    They enjoyed, in any case, many fringe benefits. The men lived in Hyundai dormitories and ate at Hyundai canteens. They wore Hyundai clothes—even Hyundai underclothes and Hyundai plastic shoes—and were given, at appropriate times in the year, appropriate Hyundai gifts. They had a Hyundai motto: Diligence. Co-operation. Self-reliance. (The word hyundai simply means ‘modern’.) They read Hyundai newspapers. They watched Hyundai films. Every possible need, from the moment of a young man’s application until the moment of a foreman’s retirement, was taken care of by Hyundai. And further, to ensure that an employee, a member of the Hyundai family, spent as little time as possible in the uncomfortable and unknown world beyond Hyundai’s protective wings, he was allowed only three days’ holiday each year—and many of them seemed reluctant, so Mr Lee informed us with gravity, to take even those.
    I daresay most European shipbuilders could have learned a great deal from a visit to Hyundai—about styles of management, about efficiency, about the means of inculcating keenness in a work force. But the Europeans I met didn’t seem to want to know. They just seemed overwhelmed and rather miserable. During my expedition through the yard I had an instructive conversation with one shipowner from the Old World, a Swede, as lugubrious a man as a caricaturist might wish. He had come to Hyundai to inspect his company’s new ship, a 160,000-ton bulk carrier called the Nord See —a vessel that might once have been built on the Tyne but was now being finished in Hyundai’s Dry Dock Number Two.
    I stayed with him for a good hour as he shinned up the Nord See’s companionways and clambered down her bulkhead ladders, peered at her tracery of pipework, measured the officers’ swimming pool (‘Nice time they’ll have in this, eh?’ he grinned, rather bitterly I thought), idly polished the brass journal at the end of her waiting propeller shaft, and knocked at the solid oak of the wardroom door.
    Then he came out