They Came for Gold(1)

From Nation, page 11, issue no. 342, November 19th 2007
Translated by Zuo Maohong
Original article: [Chinese]

Fresh after returning from Purang county in Tibet's Ngari prefecture, Liu Mingwei, a gold miner, is already busy preparing for his next expedition.

"Normally it's the time of the year for miners to go home," says Liu, adding that they usually don't go to mineral rich regions such as Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Tibet until April or May, when the frozen rivers and lakes have thawed.
But things are different this year. Fortune chasers in the town are increasingly reluctant to abandon their search as gold prices continue to surge.

Liu's hometown, Liuduzhai, in Longhui county of Hunan Province, was widely regarded as "the city of gold" in the 1980s. But its era passed with the exhaustion of its gold resources, and gold speculators based there are now taking their skills and experience and heading off to the farther corners of China's gold-rich regions. Many go to Yunnan, Sichuan, and nearby countries like Burma and Vietnam. Liu's next destination is Luoyang in Shaanxi province-- "I have friends who are already [mining gold] there... they say it's not bad." While Liu was preparing to depart, the price of 99.99% pure gold was on the verge of breaking the record of 200 yuan per gram at the Shanghai Gold Exchange. Gold prices have grown 20 percent over the last two months.

The First Golddiggers in China

When gold was discovered during the canal-digging for the construction of the Liuduzhai reservoir in the mid 1970s, Liuduzhai became a hot spot for gold digging. As one local, Wang, recalls, "the canal was filled with people. The banks were dug up, even nearby farmland didn't survive."

At the beginning of the 1980s, gold dust from Liuduzhai sold for eight to ten yuan per gram, which attracted batches of businessmen from all over the country and earning the name of "the city of gold"-- which was later borrowed by a local businessman made wealthy from gold when he named a luxury hotel he built there.

At the cost of ruined rivers and farmland, the town reared its first batch of rags-to-riches golddiggers. After the town's 1.44 tons of gold was exhausted, professional gold speculators took their honed skills, abundant experience, and accumulated capital and began searching elsewhere. The gold rush thus spread to Heilongjiang's Mohe River and Xinjiang's Aletai.

"There are always our people in places where gold mines exist," says Liu Wenhua, an official of the Liuduzhai government. Every early spring, one can meet gold miners speaking a Liuduzhai dialect on trains bound for areas like Xinjiang, Tibet, Yunnan, and Heilongjiang. But their footsteps are not limited within the national borders-- they travel as far as Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Russia, Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia.