A Malaysian tin mine

These photos followed the pictures of the trip with my dad by overnight train to Taiping. So it's quite likely that the purpose of that trip was to inspect a tin mine. Besides working for a taxi company, he also kept the accounts of at least a couple of tin mines.

Tin mining used to occupy a prominent portion of the Malaysian economy—in 1979 Malaysia produced almost a third of the world's tin—then the price collapsed in the mid-1980s and the mines became exhausted. The deposits in Malaysia are alluvial cassiterite. Today tin is an important metal for technology; your phone uses solder. China, Indonesia and Peru appear to be the largest producers at the moment.

Sorry about the blemishes in the photos but these are the only ones I have. Here you see a worker breaking the deposits with a water jet, called a monitor.

The gravel slurry is then pumped up to a top of a palong with sluices where the heavier minerals sink and are trapped in dividers and later harvested. In the picture is a tank of diesel for the machinery. The tailings are returned to other pits and the water reused.

Tin mining leaves large holes in the ground. In those days nobody thought to legislate rehabilitation so these ponds became scars on the earth. The resort The Mines near KL are built on a former mine with the hole now serving as a lake.

In 2007, the house magazine of the engineering body in Malaysia published an article on the history of tin mining in Malaysia.

Tin mining brought many Chinese immigrants to Malaya in the 19th century. I probably would not be writing this were it not for this history.