A factory (previously manufactory) or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where workers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another. Most modern factories have large warehouses or warehouse-like facilities that contain heavy equipment used for assembly line production. Typically, factories gather and concentrate resources: workers, capital and plant.

China

Many Tsui, Anne S.; Schoonhoven, Claudia Bird; Meyer, Marshall W.; Chung-Ming Lau; Milkovich, George T. "Organization and Management in the Midst of Societal Transformation: The People's Republic of China", Organization Science, Mar/Apr2004, Vol. 15 Issue 2, p133-144. believed that ancient China had been the first to create factories. In ancient China, imperial and private workshops, mills, and small manufactories had been employed since the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (771-221 BC), as noted in the historical text of the Zhou Li.Needham, Volume 4, Part 3, 16-17. During the medieval Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD), independent and government sponsored industries were developed to meet the needs of a growing population that had reached over 100 million. For example, for the printing of paper money alone, the Song court established several government-run factories in the cities of Huizhou, Chengdu, Hangzhou, and Anqi.Needham, Volume 5, Part 1, 48. The size of the workforce employed in these paper money factories were quite large, as it was recorded in 1175 AD that the factory at Hangzhou alone employed more than a thousand workers a day. The Chinese iron industry was also expanded during the Song Dynasty, with a sixfold increase in per capita cast iron output between the years 806 and 1078 AD, meaning an overall weight of 127,000,000 kg (125,000 t) of cast iron product from state-run facilities was forged in the latter year alone.Ebrey, 158.

Islamic world

The first industrial complex for glass and pottery production was built in Ar-Raqqah, Syria, in the 8th century. Extensive experimentation was carried out at the complex, which was two kilometres in length, and a variety of innovative high-purity glass were developed there. Two other similar complexes have also been discovered, and nearly three hundred new chemical recipes for glass are known to have been produced at all three sites. The first glass factories were thus built by Muslim craftsmen in the medieval Islamic world. The first glass factories in Europe were later built in the 11th century by Egyptian craftsmen in Corinth, Greece.