Gold (15 page)

I
N ANCIENT TIMES, THE LEGEND
says, a river flowed into the sky from the peach orchard of the Grand Old Lady of the West to a peak in the Linglong hills. The river fed streams that plunged back down the mountain and collected in a basin. One day a hunter discovered the pool teeming with gold fish. They swarmed through caves and leapt from the surface spewing streams of golden liquid. News of this pool reached the imperial court. A court official who arrived in Shandong to report on the fish was so overcome by the sight that he flung himself into the pool and disappeared. A second emissary arrived to find the pool dry. Terrified of returning to the Forbidden City with such news, he drafted 10,000 peasants to dig in the mountain for the fish. They found the Linglong gold.

The Chinese were mining gold by 1300 BC. They had systematic ways to prospect for it. In the seventh century an official wrote, “If
the upper soil contains cinnabar, the lower will contain gold.” They had also discovered that plants could point to precious minerals.
“If in the mountain grow spring shallots, there will be silver under the ground; if leek in the mountain, gold.” They may have been right. Plants do take up minerals from the soil.
In 1980 researchers at the University of London found plants that could take up gold and accumulate it in their tissue.
A 1998 article in
Nature
described an experiment where plants absorbed gold from polluted ore.
In 2004 a New Zealand researcher proposed a system of “phyto-remediation” in which plants would harvest metals from toxic gold mine waste. The payoff—two pounds of gold per acre.
And a paper published at the 19th World Congress of Soil Science, in 2010, said that even today some prospectors “use plant species as bioindicators of the presence of gold in soil.” The Chinese noticed such relationships in ancient times.

They had novel ways of refining gold, such as feeding it to ducks. First, they removed as many impurities as they could from panned gold, mixed what was left with chaff, and stuffed it into the ducks. Later they collected the droppings, panned out the gold a second time, mixed the refined material into another batch of chaff, and down the hatch. They did this three times, put the recovered gold aside, then fed the ducks a final batch of chaff—pure chaff, this time—to scrape out any gold bits left behind.

At the beginning of the first millennium China's rulers owned gold reserves of 200 tons, about the same as the Roman Empire's gold stock at the time. Then the mining collapsed to a pitiful trickle.
When the Mongols came to power in the thirteenth century they tried to turn the gold mines around. They suppressed bandits and put down petty tyrants who were robbing the mines, and warned their own generals not to steal gold. To revive the industry, one
Mongol emperor ordered 4,000 households in Shandong to pan for gold.

In the seventeenth century Linglong came into the hands of the famous eunuch Wei Zhongxian. Originally a criminal and a hopeless gambler, Wei had traded in his testicles for a post in the imperial household. By tradition, many domestic positions in the court could only be filled by eunuchs. Wei's creditors would not be allowed to pursue him into the Forbidden City. Once in the palace, he befriended the nurse who cared for the crown prince. When the boy became emperor at the age of fifteen, Wei began his climb to power.

Wei murdered opponents, built shrines and statues to himself, and adopted the title Nine Thousand Years, almost equal in dignity to the emperor, known by custom as Ten Thousand Years. The emperor gave Wei the Linglong mine in 1621. He ran it for six years, and the country's gold production increased to 40,000 ounces a year. When the emperor died, Wei's enemies strangled and disemboweled him. Seventeen years later the dynasty collapsed, and so did Linglong.

The new Manchu rulers hated gold mining. They believed that gold veins were dragons' veins, and digging them up would disrupt feng shui, the system of laws that governed spatial harmony. More importantly the Manchu feared unrest among the people they had conquered, and precious metals could finance an insurrection. They decreed an end to gold mining. They executed those they caught disobeying the law. Without new production, the imperial treasury wasted away.

The last gold bars were sucked from the Chinese treasury in 1842, in reparation payments to the foreign occupying powers—Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and Japan. Desperate for cash, the ruling Dowager Empress repealed the gold mining prohibition. Annual
production rebounded.
By 1888 China was producing 700,000 ounces a year, ranking it fifth in world production.

Plainly, miners had never stopped mining. They just went elsewhere for the market. A British colonial official in Burma, writing when the Chinese ban on gold mining was still in effect, noted that “by far the larger portion of all the gold used [in Burma] is brought from China. It is imported in the form of thin leaves of gold, made up into little packets, each packet weighing about one viss.” A viss equaled 3.6 pounds, a lot of gold in any century. And that was just one packet. Gold had leaked out of China along the Himalayan smuggling routes. When the gold mining prohibition ended, the gold simply headed to the nearest market, the domestic one.

Such shifts in the official attitude to gold have been repeated in modern times. Communist China's posture toward private gold has changed from approval to disapproval and back again, in time to the convulsions of the day. Yet Linglong should have had an honored place in the Chinese government's mythology. They captured it from a hated enemy, the Japanese, who had seized it at the start of World War II.

In constructing my account of Linglong, and for much else on Chinese gold, I relied on a remarkable book,
The Gold Mining History of Zhaoyuan with a Review of the Gold Industry in the P.R.
[People's Republic of]
China
, a meticulous chronicle in English and Chinese. Written by Gong Runtan, a thirty-three-year veteran of the Shandong gold industry, and Zhu Fengsan, the cosmopolitan mastermind who helped propel China to the forefront of world gold production, the book supplies, to my knowledge, the fullest account of Chinese gold available in English. From the use of gold in pills to promote immortality to a review of the Ninth Five-Year Plan, the volume has it all. It also has a gripping style, as in the story of Linglong's wartime fate, when Japan captured the mine.

“The accumulated snow on Mount Linglong had not yet melted. The biting wind sent withered branches and leaves flying across the sky, producing shrill howling.

“Early in the morning a group of confused farmers, bringing along both the old and the young, swarmed out of their home[s] and ran off into Mount Linglong. The crack of guns came near, bullets swept above the crowd, thick smoke columns rose in the village in the distance and curled up on the [dirt] road.”

Seven hundred Japanese soldiers, supported by bombers, marched into the hills and occupied the mine. They fortified the mountain with blockhouses and rings of electrified fence. They built machine gun nests and patrolled the mine with what the Chinese called “wolf dogs.” They brutalized civilians: the bodies of massacred Chinese, eviscerated by bayonet, hung from telephone poles around the mine.

“Linglong under the iron heel of the Japanese invaders,” Gong wrote, “became a hell on earth with demons and monsters . . . and evil spirits running amok, and an exceedingly brutal concentration camp. The miners led the tragic life of the vanquished.”

In six and a half years Japan took 290,000 ounces from the Linglong mine. The pages that describe it shake with Gong's indignation. I wanted to meet him, and since he was Pang Min's father-in-law, she knew where to look. At two o'clock on a sweltering afternoon we drove into the courtyard of a gray apartment complex in the heart of Zhaoyuan, and trooped upstairs.

Gong was then seventy-five. He showed me to a seat in front of a low table set with a platter of sliced watermelon. The apartment was small, but the ceiling was high and a breeze stirred through the cool, terrazzoed rooms. A mass of plastic flowers bloomed madly on a wall. Gong sat straight, with his hands on his knees. His skin was yellow,
and he looked hot. He wore his iron-gray hair in a crew cut. He wore frosted lenses that concealed his eyes.

Only two years old when the Japanese invaded, Gong had researched his account of Linglong by talking to men who had worked at the mine under the Japanese. One of the men he interviewed had infiltrated Linglong for the communists.

“He helped steal gold from the Japanese,” Gong told me through Feng Tao. “There were many of them. That was their job. They were sent by the party. The party had a lot of farmers in its membership, so the men looked like farmers, and the Japanese hired them. In fact they were guerrillas. They had a hidden smelter at Linglong where the gold was poured into molds and cooled in water. They shaped it into bars that could be sewn into clothes and smuggled out.”

It obviously gave Gong pleasure to think of Linglong in a patriotic light. A moral relish infused his writing. A collaborator named Jiang Qixu, for example, “was steeped in iniquity, with hands stained with the people's blood all over.” Sadly, the literature of mining does not abound in such accounts.

The occupation of the Linglong mine ended in style in a storm of gunfire, with the cornered Japanese commander defiantly flinging his sword at a Chinese officer, who shot him dead. The collaborator Jiang was dragged from hiding and executed. “The crisp shot echoed among the Linglong Mountains.”

The retaking of the Linglong mine marked the end of the world war, but four years of fratricidal combat remained as the Chinese fought each other to a finish in the civil war. Although Linglong's production fell, the mine contributed 7,000 ounces a year to Mao's treasury. When the communists won the civil war in 1949, Linglong might have been written into a triumphant history—a mine from imperial times turned to the service of the people! Instead, gold fell
under a pall. In the wars of ideology that followed, even to be associated with the metal was to risk contamination.

G
OLD EMBODIED THE IDEA OF
personal wealth. This presented communists with a dilemma: was gold a blessing for the desolated postwar state, or a threat to socialist purity? In 1957 this question seemed to have been answered when the premier, Zhou Enlai, backed a directive aimed at “organizing broad masses of the people to produce gold.” The broad masses were probably already at it, but now it would be legal, part of a plan to revive the mines and stimulate the production of a valuable resource. No sooner did this initiative appear, however, than it was swept away in the purges that convulsed China: the Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Four Clean-Ups, and the scourge sometimes called the war of the young against the old—the Cultural Revolution.

Approved by Mao Zedong to root out what he saw as capitalist sympathies in the leadership, the movement sent brigades of young Red Guards into the country to hunt out “deviationists.” In a decade-long rampage, gangs of zealots brutalized the educated, ruined the legal system, destroyed families, raped, murdered, maimed, and burned. In this poisonous milieu, gold was a target too. The Chinese characters for gold became a synonym for the hated bourgeoisie. Geologists stopped looking for gold. The China National Gold Group Corporation, the country's main producer and itself a creature of the state, was labeled a “bourgeois trust,” and dismantled. Officially, the Chinese gold industry ceased to exist.

O
NE OF THE MEN WHO
later transformed China's gold industry into the powerhouse it is today was at first purged and persecuted himself. When I met him, Zhu Fengsan was eighty-two. Erect and trim, he had thick hair combed straight back, and his characteristic expression was a wry, appraising smile. When I visited he was recovering from an accident. He'd crashed his new electric-powered bicycle. In the collision he shattered his patella. He pulled up his pant leg so I could see. We studied the yellow bruise and eight-inch scar in silence for a moment. “They think it was my fault,” he said, “because I am in my eighties and should not be trying new electric bicycles.”

The youngest son of a Shanghai banker, Zhu was born in the city of Hangzhou. Marco Polo called it “beyond dispute the finest and noblest city in the world,” and the Chinese agree. “Above is heaven,” goes the saying, “below is Hangzhou.”

Zhu went to a high school attached to Saint John's University, a prestigious Church of England institution in Shanghai. After high school he attended the university for a year, studying architecture. He hoped to finish his studies in the United States, but in the Chinese civil war he could not get a passport. After the communist victory, university admissions were restricted, and the courses limited to subjects considered useful to the state. Zhu picked geology, and graduated from the top-rated Tsinghua University in 1952. His fiancée and classmate, Zhou Mingbao, also a geologist, graduated at the same time. While Zhu was wondering what to do with himself, Emily, as he always called her, took a job as a teacher.

“At that time,” Zhu said, tapping my knee for emphasis, “
no
one wanted to be a teacher! Emily was the only one. She was the
only
one who applied.” He sighed and shook his head. “I loved her, so of course I was obliged to follow.”

They moved to Changchun, a long train journey northeast of Beijing, and took up posts at the Geological College. Six years later, in 1958, the Red Guards sniffed him out.

As he told me his story, Zhu never criticized his country, and always called the communist victory of 1949 “the liberation.” Yet however blandly he described events he must have suffered anguish. He had been dean of his faculty for four years when the Red Guards tore him from his family and exiled him to the countryside to be “reeducated” by the peasants. He worked on roads and labored in the mines. He returned to teaching in 1962, but in 1969 he was denounced again. This time his wife and children went with him, and for three years toiled on a farm.