Jade miners' dreams of wealth

In March 2011, the Hetian municipal government adopted a policy strictly forbidding the use of excavators to extract jade. Since it went into effect in May of that year, scenes of large-scale industrialized mining have no longer occurred there. Today, those lucky dogs who are blessed by Allah with lucrative hauls of jade are relatively rare, and the miners also know that prices they get from middlemen for the jade they dig up are tens of times – maybe even hundreds of times – less than the prices the middlemen ultimately sell the jade for. But even given these tough conditions, many jade miners refuse to give up. They don't want to let even the slightest opportunity to get rich through the work of their own two hands slip away until the last piece of jade is extracted there. [Photo/China.org.cn]