High-tech turns 'grey mice' into office workers

Donning a neat and tidy outfit, miner Huang Jian operates a computer as he works in an air-conditioned environment.

 He looks like an average office worker, except that he is working a kilometer underground.

It's hard to believe this is the same mineshaft where workers used to mock themselves as "grey mice" for the thick layer of dust shrouding their bodies after a day of work underground.

This monumental change is yet another example of how technology has altered traditional industries and people's lives in China.

Huang works in the Dongguashan copper mine in Tongling, a city in east China's Anhui Province with a mining history of more than 3,000 years. In the 1950s and 1960s, people from all over the country flooded here to build railways, factories and develop mines, kicking start the rise of New China's copper industry.

But, behind the glory was the sweat and toil of generations of miners.

Shen Chengwu, 59, can still vividly recall the working condition under which his father had served.

"Miners needed to drill manually and use heavy tools to collect the ore. The pit was filled with dust and mud, and workers could only be identified by their eyes and teeth as they were totally blackened," said Shen, who followed his father into mining.

The Dongguashan mine, which began operating in 1966, has been mined to a depth of more than 1 kilometer and is one of the deepest copper mines in Asia.

Recalling the old times, Huang said when he came to work there in 1993, the temperature in the mine was often as high as 30 to 40 degrees Celsius in summer and many miners would have heatstroke. Working in air conditioning was totally beyond imagination.

"We had reckoned a decade ago that automated driving is the future of the mining industry," said Chen Huiquan, senior technical supervisor of the Dongguashan mine.

"Although it was still technically immature back then, we believe this was the best solution to improve the working environment for the miners."

In 2020, Dongguashan adopted driverless technology in rail haulage for electric locomotives 1,000 meters underground.

Since then, many miners have bid farewell to the humid, sweltering environment and can instead operate the locomotives pleasantly from the central control room.