Word: tin
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...company that, despite the appearance of its dirty, three-story office building on Sihom Street in Vientiane, seemed on the verge of success. Gem Mining Lao held sapphire mining concessions, estimated to be worth $100 million, in Bokeo province, a region of dense forest, green rice paddies and rusty tin shacks where farmers were known to find sapphires and rubies in the red earth after heavy rains. In the cozy world of expats in Vientiane the Danes came to know the owners, Bernie Jeppesen and Julie Bruns. They dined at the same restaurants, went to the same parties and were...
...this way, primarily to fight a Chinese pirate who had been terrorizing the strait from a Palembang stronghold. And though there were already Chinese settlements there, as well as in towns such as Tuban in Java, the Chinese on Bangka were mainly drawn by - or imported for - work as tin miners in later centuries...
...impact of the tin mines is visible in the lifeless green pools that dot the landscape. The impact of the migration is visible on a rutted, auburn-hued dirt track outside Pangkal Pinang, where Cung A Siuk lives. There are a handful of houses out here. Cung says there used to be fewer. There is no news, either. She's never heard of the persecution of Chinese people in Java and Sumatra. John, the photographer, and I are the first white people she has ever seen, and she's 73 years old. "If I were scared," she says, "I would...
...decade ago. It's big and sturdy, all faded wood except for the stone porch. She still grows pineapples and cassavas out back; she may be old but she has to work or she feels weak. Her husband, Ji Chiu, was first generation. He came to work the tin mines, a "sold piglet," as they were called, since they were sold by their parents with no real promise of return. She met him when she sold coconut cookies to the tin miners. They had five children, but twins died at birth...
...right on that score as well). Would that the lives of all migrant workers, of any generation, had such happy results. Wherever you go, you see people inventing jobs for themselves, selling bats at a roadside stand, for instance, or directing traffic for tips. On Bangka, men mine tin from the coastal seabed, employing motor-powered pumps to vacuum the sea floor onto patchwork floating trays in which they search for their prize. More often, a living wage, or the promise of one, is thought to exist elsewhere, which is why there is a constant stream of migrant workers flowing...