Those three images do not display.
That little animation in the video was nice though.
The term adit worked much better in search engines.
It works fine for me, but I reupload them to a more stable image host anyway. (Probably it's the great china firewall to blame.
JK). And I added the translations in the picture too. And it's quite difficult to translate phrases directly. I think ancient Chinese engineers independently developed similar techniques with western counter part and use their own terms, so sometimes I'll have to read a lot about how western sources describe their mine before I can translate. I also find the modern term for it as drift mining.
In my search for ancient China mines, I also being curious about if there are also ancient mines in Taiwan. And I come up with some surprising results, as I thought being isolated in an island the native should be less advanced and hard to find proper ancient mines. But surprisingly I do find them, and it has something to do with placer deposit. Since Taiwan Island is essentially formed with sedimentary processes and raised up with tectonics activity with volcanoes. Taiwan is actually a nice little island for strip and open mining. And more surprisingly that most of it happened near Taipei, which is the capital city and no mining at present day. There are industrial activities even date back beyond 3000 years. And interestingly it's linked to the production of "shells" (Cypraea moneta used as ancient money through out China, even found as far as inland Szechuan province. But only produced in tropical area near ocean, Taiwan is one of the production site near mainland China). I wonder if there is any connection that when producing shells transformed into producing bronze and copper coinages is because shells are actually "mined" from placer deposit near water as well. Producing huge quantity of shells is not like picking up random shells on the beach, it's actually a massive industrial activities with digging up thousands of years' deposit shells, and it can be exhausted easier than mines. I wonder if that's why shells become obsolete as currency when it's deposit reduced, and can not sustain the quantity required to be a common exchange. Like the metal coinages can not catch up the growing needs of monetary exchanges thus giving birth to fiat money.
I wonder if mining techniques are not originally meant for mining (metal) purpose (or for a quarry). But developed for other usage as well. Like digging up well, which is for discovering water, and in Chinese we still used the word "mineral well" to describe vertical shaft (礦井). And using word as 平硐 to describe adit. (which is level "stone cave" or the ancient word for a mine). And using words like 礦坑, which is mineral cave/hole but as more modern usage to mean a mine.
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Topic: How do mines work? (Read 8955 times)