Gold mining in South Korea: Koryo Mines (part 1)

The Koryo Mine area showing the rough terrain and the grinding plant and cyanide mill.

By Robert Neff

Gold mining on the Korean Peninsula is often associated with North Korea but in the 1960s the Korean Consolidated Mining Company (KCMC) operated several mines in South Korea.

The KCMC was "a Korean corporation, financed to a great extent by Westerners" (most were in or had been in Korea and were "aware of its mineral resources") and managed by Richard S. Whitcomb, a retired American brigadier general who has since been honored by the South Korean government for his role during the Korean War.'

One of these gold mines was the Koryo Mine. It was in North Geyongsang Province, on a tributary of the Nakdong River near the small town of Chunyang, and was the largest and most important of the KCMC's mines.

The history of this mine is somewhat unknown. From the early 1880s (and likely even earlier), Korean miners dug "coyote hole" tunnels ― small tunnels that wound about following small veins of gold. But in 1910 the Japanese acquired the site and started mining on a larger scale until the early 1940s.

Little remained of these earlier mining operations, except for a large "waste dump" of stones (described as looking like a "great waterfall") that had been uneconomical for the Japanese to process. But with advances in technology in the 1960s, the KCMC was sure it could process them at a profit.

When the KCMC began operations in the early 1960s, it was faced with several obstacles including transportation to the remote site. The heavier equipment was carried up the access road ― nothing more than a dry stream bed ― on two ex-British army trucks but most of the goods (cement, gravel, sand and timber) were carried up the mountain on the backs of men.

The machinery available to the KCMC was worn and outdated and the work was dangerous. One man could direct the loose stones, merely by stepping on them, into a chute that led into an ore car but had to be careful so as not to fall in with them. Then, two other men would push the car (when full it weighed about 1.5 tons) to the grizzle where the stones were sent to the jaw crusher and then later transported to the stamps to be processed.

A lot of the equipment purchased in Korea had to be rebuilt or modified as the local "manufactures apparently had no idea themselves of what [their equipment] could do [and thus] had no performance speculations."

A lot of problems were solved using everyday items. One example was the "soccer stopper valve" that was basically an inflated soccer ball that plugged a hole at the bottom of the tank. When the tank needed to be emptied, a worker would crawl under it and deflate the ball, allowing the tank to empty.

I would like to thank Fred Dustin for providing these photographs.

Looking down at the site from the slope.

Ore cars waiting for loads.

Unloading the ore car into the "grizzle."

The "grizzle" and chutes leading into the jaw crushers.

The stamps ― used to crush the stone.

"A D-6 Caterpillar tractor diesel engine powered the whole plant at Koryo. It was a terrible job to get enough diesel to the monster because of the distance and the bad road."