From Time:
Old Zhao, his fellow miners called him — a weary-looking man, 54, wearing a yellow safety helmet and a miner’s lamp strung around his neck, black coal dust embedded in the lines on his forehead and lightly powdering the insides of his ears. Last May Zhao and a team of other veterans were assigned to search for the bodies of 57 miners killed in Zuoyun County, deep in China’s Shanxi province. The dead men had accidentally tunneled into a flooded mine shaft next to their own. “Many of them are very young–just boys,” Zhao says, pausing to light a cigarette. “I keep seeing their faces in my dreams, and they remind me of my son. He’s 27 and works at a mine in the next county.”[Full Text ]
