Treasure Hunting

Today I found an older article that I thought ya’ll mind find interesting. It was written for The BBC in September 2008, and is called “Living off the sewers of gold.”

From what the article says, the sewers of Dhaka, Bangladesh, are disgusting. The city is overcrowded and polluted, and basically as awful as one can imagine. But many people make a living by panning for gold in the sewer’s dirty water.

With stained fingers, men pan for gold in the drains in exactly the same way as the treasure-seekers of “the legendary California gold rush of the 1850s.”

So how does the gold get there?

Tiny specks of gold are accidentally brushed into the open sewers that run alongside the narrow streets of Dhaka’s historic “gold bazaar.” The area is lined with shops selling gold jewelery, about 350 shops which employs about 20,000 people! The gold is softened over charcoal fires or gas burners and then made into necklaces and earrings.

Every morning all the workshops and gold shops are swept clean, the gold specks (and sometimes even precious stones!) get swept into the streets and ending up in the sewers.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the price of gold has been tempting everyone at nearly $1,000 an oz. But on the flip side - gold is now so expensive that many people aren’t buying it anymore, the district is slimming in size, and the amount of gold being swept into the streets is getting smaller and smaller.

Share This

Trackback URI | Comments RSS