North Korean people living near gold mines in North Pyongan province have converted their homes into makeshift processing operations, crushing and washing ore to extract gold for private sale, and are skipping state-mandated agricultural mobilization to keep working.
A source in North Pyongan province told Daily NK on Monday that in the Pukjin workers’ district of Unsan county, local people have set up workspaces inside and around their homes, purchasing ore that flows out from nearby mines and extracting gold independently.
Unsan county is one of North Korea’s best-known gold-producing areas. Military units operating under the Korean People’s Army’s 7th and 8th General Bureaus, the military bodies responsible for foreign currency earning operations, maintain a concentration of large and small mines and alluvial gold collection sites across the county. In addition to vein mining, workers pan for gold in the riverbeds, washing sand containing gold particles from the streambeds. Ore leaking out from some of these state-run operations has been making its way into private hands, and the informal extraction business built around it has grown steadily more organized.
For those able to secure a reliable supply of leaked ore, the source explained, the operation offers a comparatively stable income stream, and wealthier locals have been scaling up accordingly.
In the Pukjin workers’ district, a significant number of people are now employing 10 or more laborers brought in from outside the area, dividing tasks among them: crushing ore, washing it, and separating out the gold. Run out of private homes, these setups function in practice as small-scale specialized production outfits. Mechanized crushing equipment would make the work more efficient, but unstable electricity and the difficulty of maintaining machinery mean that most operators rely on hand-powered grinders instead. “You have to break the rock into small pieces to separate the gold out,” the source said. “It takes a lot of people to do the crushing and washing.”
Gold takes priority over the rice paddy
The scale of the activity has grown considerably in a short time. “In the past, a few homes would do this kind of work quietly,” the source said. “Now the number of homes running operations with 10 or more hired workers keeps growing. Because the money is good, people are taking on outside workers for extended periods and paying them daily wages.”
The operations continued uninterrupted even during the state’s all-out rice transplanting mobilization drive. North Korean authorities have been pressing local people across the country to report to agricultural work during the planting season, but in Unsan county, many chose to stay home and keep extracting gold instead.
Officials from the North Pyongan province agricultural management committee visited Unsan county at the end of last month to assess the progress of transplanting work, and found that the majority of people in the Pukjin workers’ district had skipped the mobilization entirely and were occupied with gold extraction at home. Despite the apparent severity of the violation, no significant action followed. “Everyone expected the inspectors to make a fuss and crack down after seeing that people were prioritizing gold over rice planting,” the source said, “but contrary to expectations, the whole thing was quietly dropped.”
The likely explanation, the source suggested, is that gold is one of North Korea’s primary foreign currency earners and is entangled with the interests of multiple powerful state institutions, making enforcement politically sensitive.
Private gold extraction of this kind falls outside the scope of any official state permit and can in principle be shut down at any time. Even so, local people continue to pursue it, viewing it as effectively the only reliable way to earn cash quickly in that part of the country. “Everyone around the mines knows that gold means money,” the source said. “People keep at it even while watching for crackdowns.”
Reporting from inside North Korea
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June 9, 2026 at 10:36PM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)