Mogok - Myanmar Ruby Mines

Mogok, spread out in the valley bottom, the town of rubies,

mist-clad, pricked with fire and out of the mist the shaped forms of mountains rise up in vague outline above the valley. Miner suddenly grown rich, the gambler poised between the strokes of fate, the sorter dreaming of his fortune.

The big Mogok ruby bazaar is permanent and the market-place is full with traffic. Along the road to the Mogok market, market-women with great hats on their heads, and the produce of their gardens spread before them. Fruits and vegetables abound. Here are small tomatoes done up in little cane cylinders, through the pattern of which the red fruit glints, baskets of scarlet raspberries, piles of flowers, and a variety of strange products from mushrooms to bamboo-roots. Down these lanes the crow is laughing, talking, bargaining,

While the sun burns down on Mogok and upon the gay colors of the clothes of the market women . It is the East, the real East ; clean, neat, and prosperous. Crescent silver neck lets, big again as the moon, about their throats. Some are of the Shan, with fair skin, with even a rosy flush in their cheeks. All are over-topped by the great hat, symbol of the Far East. Here and there in the crowd is a Burmese damsel, in silk, velvet, pearls and a yellow translucent parasol, the comforter of some ruby king.

Towering above the line of sight are Mogok's houses of the prosperous trader, all of stone, very high ; and from its mid-storey protrudes the head of a retainer, pipe in mouth, his slit eyes restless, absorbing. At the window of a house in Mogok’s main street, barred like a leopard's cage, sit groups of  worker naked and intent, sorting the rubies which lie in gleaming trays upon their knees.

Others rolls cigars by the hour, selling them to the passers-by. At intervals there are Chinese eating-houses, equipped with little tables and stools, and dressers fitted out with blue china, and chopsticks, and pewter spoons. The fare is varied and savoury, and pigs' legs, plump fowls, cabbages and ducks, hang from strings like a curtain.

Mogok houses are filled with crowds of Myanmar's, Shan, Lisu and others who crowd round the little tables and feed in groups, bowl to chin, their feet perched high up on the narrow stools.

At the Mogok mines they dig the soil, yellow and scarred with pits. The hill people in blue clothes and yellow parasol-like hats ; people in loose trousers, showing legs tattooed with tigers and dragons ; people small of stature with muscles of iron. The process of mining is simple in Mogok .

A straight bamboo pole twenty feet high stuck like a mast in the yellow soil. Near its top, through a slit, works another horizontally; at one end of it a make-weight, a basket filled with mud or stones, at the other a long cane reaching down like the line of a fisherman ; last of all a bucket to hold water or mud, as the case may be. If it be water, the miner stands at the little pit's mouth, lowers the bucket, lets it fill and come up again, the cane slipping through his fingers ; and on its emerg­ing, tilts the water from it into a channel, down which it runs yellow and turbid to swell the stream by the roadside. If mud, the digger in the pit fills it with a spade and lets it run up to the man overhead, who empties it with a jerk of his wrist on to an adjoining mud-heap. When this heap has grown big enough it is washed, and the rubies are visible.

At a corner, in the dazzling sun, a child stops, scraping the yellow earth from a dry heap into a shallow basket. A child at play it would seem. But when the little basket is laden she carries it away to where a woman in a dark blue kilt is at work, close to her figure as she sits, a pale yellow coat and pink silk bound about her coils of black hair. Her wide sleeves lift as she works,' revealing her slender arms. And her business in life so much at least as she transacts here - is to let the yellow stream run through each basket of earth, till all the concealing clay is washed away and pebbles alone survive ; from this remnant to pick out with precision rubies, which she slips under her tongue till her mouth is full. The occupation has its merits.

Little streams of yellow mud run across the plain, making pools and puddles, run in bewildering variety the. This is Mogok ruby-mining in its indigenous simplicity.

In a very little space off Mogok’s main street and in the park, groups of people with wide hats are clustered close together, one is stricken with curiosity to know what they are about. You crush into the crowd and find yourself in the midst of the buyers and sellers of rubies.

In the centre of each group there is a shining brass tray full of rubies and it looks like a disc of beaten gold in the sun. By it sits the buyer, ringed by satellites, each of whom believes himself an expert. Then there is a swaying in the crowd, and a miner edges in, picturesque in his wide trousers and great flapping hat, and subsides by the tray on his haunches. There is a little cloth bag in his hands, tied very tightly round the neck with string. Slowly he unwinds the suing and the masked eyes of the buyer glitter. No word is spoken.

The seller is in no hurry. When at last the long string has been unwound and the hand clasping the little globe of cloth relaxes its amatory grip, the mouth of the bag is turned down, and from its interior there flows into the tray the red stream of stones.

Then the buyer moves. His long delicate nervous fingers reach out swiftly, and in an instant the little pyramid is spread over the shining disc, each stone blinking in the light.

For the next few seconds and still in silence, fingers are moving. The good and the bad stones are separated from each other, and formed into two little piles ; the bad being pushed back to the seller's end of the tray; the good brought instinctively a little closer to the buyer.

At this stage discussion starts. All the critics have their say ; the seller eloquent, the buyer cold and deprecatory. Thus the duel proceeds.

There is a score of these trays, like suns in the close cluster of men. And that is nearly all there is to tell. Like all that is truly Eastern, the process is simple in its character, limitless in its fascination. One can describe in a minute what one can look upon with interest for hours.

Look at the buyers, they are backed by a hundred thousand dollar of capital. Many came here a few years ago as poor people. Some got some money into their fingers. After a while they lend it at high interest rates, on the security of gold and rubies. Then they change to the ruby trade and now some of them are the richest guys around.

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