Mongolia's "ninja" miners help sate China lust for gold
BORNUUR, Mongolia Thu Apr 19, 2012 3:28am EDT  1 of 11. A small-
scale miner holds his gold that was melted together at a
processing plant located around 100km (62 miles) north of the
Mongolian capital city Ulan Bator in this April 5, 2012 file
picture.  Credit: Reuters/David Gray/Files              Two
decades of ninja activity have already nurtured scores of
middlemen linking the underpopulated steppe with the Chinese
market. And it hasn't been difficult to encourage Mongolia's
struggling crop farmers and once-nomadic herders to supply them.
One English word appears regularly in the ninjas' guttural
Mongolian: the "changers" are a motley group of smugglers who
trade black market gold, much of which ends up in China.  "The
changers smuggle it to China - the miners do all the work, but
those who buy the gold make the money," said Urantsetseg, one of
the many female miners in Zamaar, a gold-producing district
south of Ulan Bator.  While all producers are