On the outskirts of one of China's most polluted cities, an old farmer stares despairingly out across an immense lake of black dust and bubbling toxic waste that he remembers as fields of wheat and corn. A dedicated communist who, as a young man, took part in anti-bourgeois land reforms, 74-year-old Yan Man Jiahong still believes in his revolutionary heroes but despises the local officials and entrepreneurs he blames for what has happened to his home village.
'Chairman Mao was a hero and he saved our lives,' he says sadly. 'But these people only care about money. They have destroyed our lives.'
Vast fortunes are being amassed here, in Inner Mongolia, from the stranglehold it exerts on the world's rare earths, which have a variety of hi-tech applications and are vital in so-called green technologies, being found in everything from hybrid cars to the magnets that drive wind turbines. More than 90 per cent of all the world's legally mined rare earths come from this province, but the process used to extract neodymium, needed for the magnets, and the other chemical elements has an appalling environmental impact.
As developed countries flaunt their environmental credentials by building wind turbines, they are, probably unwittingly, contributing to a vast lake of poison in northern China that has swallowed up swathes of land and reduced farming communities to ghost towns.
Hidden behind smoke-shrouded factory complexes in the city of Baotou, patrolled by platoons of security guards, lies a 10-kilometre wide body of water - known as a tailing lake - that has poisoned farmland for miles around, sickened thousands of people and put one of China's key waterways in jeopardy. This vast, hissing cauldron of chemicals rises 30 metres above the surrounding land and is the dumping ground for seven million tonnes of mined rare earth a year, after it has been doused in acid and chemicals and processed through red-hot furnaces to extract its bounty.
From hundreds of factories processing rare earths in Baotou, rusting pipelines meander for miles out to the man-made lake, where, mixed with water, the foul-smelling waste is pumped day after day.
In a parallel universe, this tailing lake - which resembles a volcanic landscape punctuated with steaming geysers - might be a tourist draw. But there are no signposts or paved roads leading to this deadly attraction - and it took hours to find a taxi driver brave enough to take us to it.