A mere 16 kilometres from Datong lie the 1,500-year-old Cloud Ridge Caves, a spectacular complex of Buddhist sculptures carved into sandstone grottoes. Over-mining has hollowed out one-seventh of land in Shanxi and many people live in constant fear that the earth under their feet may suddenly subside, swallowing them and their houses, burying them alive. Most villagers in Xindao, in the suburbs of the provincial capital Taiyuan, have abandoned their ramshackle houses as the village has sunk by at least three metres over the past few years. Operators try to get rid of bodies of dead miners to cover up accidents. Others threaten to withhold compensation, usually around £2,000, unless family members of the dead agree not to publicise the accidents.As one unscrupulous mine owner comments in Li Yang’s powerful 2003 film about the Shanxi mining industry, Blind Shaft: “There’s a shortage of everything except people in China.”The side-effects are numerous. Operators ignore safety standards to maximise output, and squeeze as much coal as they can out of the ground. Illegal mines, when shut down, routinely reopen once inspectors leave, lured by buoyant coal prices Many of the deaths at the illegal coal mines go unreported.

Last year, 468 Shanxi miners died in accidents out of a nationwide casualty toll of 5,986.The private collieries are where most of the accidents take place. China’s economic boom has mostly benefited the cities of the eastern seaboard and the southern provinces, and left many rural areas still struggling.Most of the miners are farmers who are on the wrong side of the growing rural-urban wealth divide. Increasingly desperate, they head for provinces such as Shanxi and take work down the pits of small, dangerous, mostly private coal mines. Just a fortnight ago, 53 miners were killed in an explosion in the Linjiazhuang colliery of Lingshi county, near Jinzhong City.Safety standards are regularly ignored in the interest of ramping up production; a Chinese miner is 100 times more likely to die in a workplace accident than his American counterpart. Last year, 6,000 workers were killed by floods, fires and explosions caused by lax safety rules and inadequate safety equipment, sacrifices to the country’s massive hunger for coal as the economy simmers.In February last year, an explosion ripped through a colliery in Liaoning province killing 214 workers in what was China’s deadliest mine disaster since 1949. Put it this way – every million tons of coal produced in the country costs the lives of around five Chinese people.

Output is increasing by 15 per cent a year and the number of coal mining deaths is expected to rise too, despite government efforts to close the worst offending mines. More than half of all finished industrial goods are now made in China, and they could not have been manufactured without power from coal. The economic boom has lifted hundreds of millions of people off the poverty line, but the downside is immense. China’s coal mines are also the world’s deadliest, by a big margin, accounting for 80 per cent of mining deaths globally. f Also, about half of the coke supply in the world market is from the province.Coal is a matter of life and death in China, heating homes and powering the factories that produce the goods driving China’s economic boom.