The Ninja Miners

In a side valley I found the ninja miners, as Mongolia calls its artisanal gold diggers, working a hand-built sluice of rocks, sandbags and river water. Informal, semi-legal, entirely serious: a family operation moving gravel by the shovel for flecks of metal by the gram.

They let me watch from the rim once it was established that I was a writer and not an inspector, distinctions that matter at a sluice. I kept my notebook out and my questions few. The economics are brutal and transparent: world gold price at the top, wet boots at the bottom, everything in between taken by middlemen.

I write about what states plan and abandon. This is the opposite pole: what people build without anyone's permission, wherever the ground pays. Both, I am coming to think, are the same subject.