Township tale mining9/19/2023 ![]() Most freelance miners in these hills, which produce nearly every piece of the world’s finest jade, are drug-addicted migrants, strangers to one another and lost to their families. ![]() Three people, Ye Min Naing thinks, were killed, but who really knows? Like many deaths in the mines of Hpakant township in northern Myanmar (once known as Burma), this accident never appeared in the media. ![]() Somehow fellow wildcat miners pulled him out, along with a 19-year-old who was left paralyzed by the accident. “Up to here,” the 28-year-old says, making a slashing motion at his neck. Then a friend working near him was swallowed by a surge of earth. Ye Min Naing heard the landslide before he saw it, a bass note that rattled his bones like thunder. A truck with wheels the height of a man had just deposited loose stones at the edge of the mountain, sending hundreds of scavengers scrambling through the tailings in hopes of finding a precious lump of jade. ![]() It was a rainy night six months ago, at the tail end of the monsoons. When the earth collapsed, as it does nearly every day in the jade hills of Myanmar, Ye Min Naing was poised on a steep slope of rubble and scree. An exclusive reportīy Hannah Beech/Hpakant | Photographs by adam dean Myanmar’s jade mines may yield great wealth-but they leave a long trail of death. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |