Guangxi villagers strike gold to the tune of 1b yuan in Ghana with secret method

An estimated 50,000 gold diggers, known as “the Shanglin gang", work in Ghana’s gold mines, Africa's largest producer of the metal after South Africa. Many have been lured to the foreign land after hearing friends and relatives' outrageous stories of their success.

They are Shanglin villagers who have started from scratch, ambitious high school dropouts and hardworking labourers eager to trade their sweat for cash. They have made a fortune in the West African country in the past eight years by investing and working in small and medium-sized gold mines, said the report.

One such miner reportedly brought a gold bar to a relative as a “gift” upon returning to his hometown. Another person ordered a Ferrari over the phone from Hong Kong airport while he was transferring to a flight home.

While to many these revelations sounds like wild rumours, an insider working at a local bank produced solid proof of their riches. In May and June 2011 alone, he said, more than 1 billion yuan (HK$1.2 billion) was wired into Shanglin by villagers working abroad, dwarfing the township’s 2012 revenue of little more than 300 million yuan.

When the Shanglin villagers arrived in Ghana in 2005, larger sites for hard-rock gold mining had already been snapped up by international corporations. Smaller sites, using the placer mining technique usually near rivers, were traditionally run by quasi-professional independent operations.