A decade later, the company has 11 giant paper making machines, 5,300 employees, $1 billion in annual revenue and a huge new facility under construction in the country's other booming export hub, the Yangtze River Delta area near Shanghai. Reported profit last year rose 349 percent to $175 million.

Nine Dragons is now one of the fastest growing paper companies, and yet it says it cannot keep up with demand for container board, the material used to make boxes, because of the booming growth in the Chinese economy and exports.

Foreign paper companies have been slow to build a sizable manufacturing base in China, Analysts doubt they will catch up any time soon. And Chinese manufacturers have advantages. They burn cheap coal rather than clean but expensive natural gas. And they are capitalizing on less expensive labor and the newest machinery, while paper makers in the United States and Europe are often using less efficient machines from the 1970s and 1980s.

"It's very difficult for U.S. companies to get into this business now," said Woo at BNP Paribas. "I heard five or six years ago they looked at opportunities but they didn't do anything.

"Right now," Woo added, "the largest globally is Smurfit Stone. Weyerhauser is No. 2. By 2008, Nine Dragons could be No. 1."

Analysts have been nearly unanimous in their praise of Zhang, though she came under some criticism for appointing her 25-year-old son as a nonexecutive member of the Nine Dragons board of directors.

But Zhang vigorously defends the appointment, saying her son is qualified and Nine Dragons is, after all, a family company. She has a second son in high school. And her younger brother, Zhang Chang Fei, is the company's deputy chief executive.

Zhang jumped to No. 5 this year in the Forbes ranking of the wealthiest people in China, from No. 107 last year, largely because of the huge public stock listing.

She has not lost her ambition, though. Sometimes called the Queen of Trash, she doesn't disown the title. But, she said, "Some day, I'd like to be known as the queen of containerboards."

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