Heaven meets hell where blue hills lining Mongolia's vast grasslands, untouched for millions of years, have been turned into giant slag heaps.
Multi-storey floating dredgers scoop up the beds of newly diverted rivers and, with metallic rumblings straight out of a sci-fi film, crunch and separate the gold-bearing deposits from the debris they disgorge 24 hours a day.
Vast floodplains, above which at night the Milky Way stretches across the sky, are being turned upside down and areas just as big await a similar fate.
Nearby, goldrush towns are rising from the dirt, turning the central part of the land of Genghis Khan into a squalid Wild West.
It is all legal.
But at night, the dredgers are followed by the ninjas -- illegal miners named after the green, turtle-shell-like pans they carry on their backs -- who sift the droppings under cover of darkness and pan them for the gold the dredgers have missed.
The only sign of the ninjas the next morning is the dozens of discarded batteries from their torches.
Mongolia, once the center of one of the world's greatest empires, has gold in them thar hills, and foreign companies have been quick to grab a piece of the action.
Some multinationals have tried to clean up the mess they leave behind, but others have done nothing. As for the ninjas, they are doing irreparable damage -- to the environment, to themselves and to the herders living nearby in circular, white tents called "yurts" in Russian and gers in Mongolian.
In some places the ninjas simply dig 20m holes in the ground, or sift disgorged material left by the dredgers or pan rivers, using a system of secret flashes and calls at night to warn the others of danger or of an approaching official.
Elsewhere they use poisonous mercury to absorb the gold and then boil the mixture, evaporating the mercury, to get at the gold. In some gers, the apparatus sits next to the kitchen stove.
"We have found herders with five to six times the safety limit of mercury in their urine," said D. Jargalsaikhan, chairman of the Mineral Resources Authority of Mongolia.
"The damage the ninjas are doing is a major problem. Also, about 30 percent of small [legal] gold miners do not care about the environment."
Nomadic livestock herding of sheep, goats, horses, cattle, yaks and camels, constitutes the core of Mongolia's economy and represents the basis of the nation's cultural traditions.
About 60 percent of the country is covered by grassland while the Gobi desert envelops the south.
The ninjas are herders who lost everything in three years of devastating "zuds," or disasters. Some turned to illegal mining just to survive. Some are making it rich.
Other ninjas are relatives of legal miners holed up in such gold-rush towns as Ogoomor Baga, with its delapidated shacks and central, non-stop disco. Some are legal miners working overtime.
On the central steppe of Zamaar, the ninjas live brazenly in camps of hundreds of gers and traditional pitched tents.
"We can't go in there," said a Mongolian geologist, watching one such camp after he had navigated the mostly dirt roads for five hours from the capital Ulan Bator. "There may be drunks, bad people. We don't want to start a fight."
All was quiet. In the camps there are shop gers, satellite television gers, pool-playing gers and even girlie-bar gers. All surrounded by treacherous holes in the earth, old mines that give way and kill all too often.
In the river, teenagers and sun-wizened old folk panned the stream, every few minutes coming up to show off a piece of gold the size of a sliver of tooth but sometimes worth a few dollars. Men on tiny horses sat and watched.
"This is not a good business for us," one said. "We are not making money. We are doing this just to survive."
More than 30 percent of the primeval country, nearly half the size of Western Europe, has been licensed for exploration and mining which have taken off, with copper, lead and other minerals sucked up by booming neighbor China.
Gold mining alone, legal and illegal, has become a key driver of the economy, spinning off smaller businesses such as shops, kiosks and bars in gold rush towns and in Ulan Bator.
"In five to 10 years, mining will easily double gross domestic product," said the Mineral Authority's Jargalsaikhan. "Mining will change the whole country. Hopefully for the better."
Robin Grayson, general director of Eco-Minex International, a British-Mongolian gold exploration joint venture, estimates there are about 100,000 ninjas, including families and support services such as shops and bars.
"Townships are growing up along the sides of the roads just like the Wild West." He reckons 13 tonnes of gold is produced legally each year, seven tonnes illegally.
"In terms of GDP per person, this [Ogoomor Baga] is the richest town in the country."
Jargalsaikhan said the government plan was to legalize and organize the ninjas, to stop the drain on the gold mining economy. Mongolia had asked for World Bank assistance, he said.
"Arresting them doesn't work," he said. "We can't afford to keep so many people on site."
Ogoomor Baga tried detaining the ninjas for a while.
They were put to work on the garden of the police station, which is now the only place in town with a lawn and a nice little pavilion where visitors may sit out and enjoy the view.
Japan has deployed long-range missiles in a southwestern region near China, the Japanese defense minister said yesterday, at a time when ties with Beijing are at their lowest in recent years. The missiles were installed in Kumamoto in the southern region of Kyushu, as Japan is attempting to shore up its military capacity as China steps up naval activity in the East China Sea. “Standoff defense capabilities enable us to counter the threat of enemy forces attempting to invade our country ... while ensuring the safety of our personnel,” Japanese Minister of Defense Shinjiro Koizumi said. “This is an extremely important initiative for
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) today accepted an invitation from Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to lead a delegation to China next month, saying she hopes to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations and bring stability to the Taiwan Strait. “I am grateful and happy to accept this invitation,” Cheng said in a statement from the KMT chairperson’s office. Cheng said she hopes both sides can work together to promote the peaceful development of cross-strait relations, enhance exchange and cooperation, bring stability to the Taiwan Strait and improve people’s livelihoods. At today's news conference, Cheng said any efforts to
MORE POPULAR: Taiwan Pass sales increased by 59 percent during the first quarter compared with the same period last year, the Tourism Administration said The Tourism Administration yesterday said that it has streamlined the Taiwan Pass, with two versions available for purchase beginning today. The tourism agency has made the pass available to international tourists since 2024, allowing them to access the high-speed rail, Taiwan Railway Corp services, four MRT systems and four Taiwan Tourist Shuttles. Previously, five types of Taiwan Pass were available, but some tourists have said that the offerings were too complicated. The agency said only two types of Taiwan Pass would be available, starting from a three-day pass with the high-speed rail and a three-day pass with Taiwan Railway Corp. The former costs NT$2,800
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
RSS