I'm a miner and my name is Dogdan.

Born in the countryside, I didn't have much education, and my brother was a year older than me. And my grades are much better than mine, and my family sold the last acre of land for my brother to study.

As a result, I gave up my studies altogether and went into the mine with the older kids.

At that time, it was a black worker, and 180 yuan a day was my salary.

This was a huge amount of money for me at the age of 14, and of course it was ridiculously high in other industries at the time.

Let me briefly tell you about the process of going to the mine, but it is not the kind of mining that you can dig like you think.

The clothes for going down to the mine are a complete set, from the outer coat to the inner underwear are arranged by the company.

I was very small, and I wore the smallest size and was even bigger.

I heard that all of them had to be changed into company clothes, not because they were dirty underground, but because the clothes we brought with us might rub against them and generate static electricity, and if sparks were generated underground, it might cause a gas explosion.

The ones I hate the most are the rubber shoes for going to the mines, which are honestly similar to the rain boots I wear when it's raining. It's just thicker, harder, and more breathless for our feet, but the team leader won't let us go down the mine until we finish dressing.

Yes, there is a group leader for every ten people. My team leader is the eldest child who took me into the same village as the mine, called Dahai.

The sea is attentive and his attentiveness is reflected in many ways.

He would remind each of us to bring a miner's lamp to the mine, which was one of my least favorite things. Because there is also a headlamp on the heavy hard hat on the top of the head, and I think it is redundant to hold one in my hand. But the sea always says that if something happens, you know how useful it is.

Every time I went down the mine, all the electronic equipment was not allowed to be brought down. I heard that it was also to prevent static electricity from causing gas explosions caused by electrical equipment, and the sea hated it every time I mentioned it. Because there are always colleagues who will sneak off their mobile phones, even if they know that there is no signal, they want to secretly check the time on their mobile phones.

Haihai loved being with me and he was very relieved because I didn't have the money to buy a mobile phone.

The sea often says that safety comes first, prevention comes first, and so on. These are also things he memorized from the workbook, but the leader likes people like him. So he appreciated very quickly, and he became the captain in the first month I first came in.

The sea often uses a small video on the mobile phone as an example to teach us, and that video is a bit ridiculous. For those of us who went to the mines, we were shown a video of an accident at a gas station, and the video showed a person talking on the phone next to a gas station, which caused a gas station explosion.

For a long time I thought it was given to him by the leader of the sea, or rather by the project manager. This video may be fake, and I have never understood why an invisible fire would make a gas station explode. It may be a coincidence, but a colleague said that it was made by something called PS.

Every time the sea goes down, I put this video on it, and then the reason is the same. How open is it because a mobile phone exploded, to warn us not to bring electronic devices when we go down to the mine.

When everyone is all dressed, it's time to go to the mine.

To get down to the mine, you need to take an elevator composed of only iron plates, and colleagues like to call this elevator a tank cage.

But I think when the elevator is closed, it's like a cage for cats and dogs. The colleagues who work around me often chant a sentence, and they will say it when they listen to it too much: the tank cage is on one after another, and the day has passed. If the tank cage can't be stopped, a lifetime will pass.

I still remember the first time I went to the mine, and I thought I would be able to start working after going down. Later, I learned that going down the well in a tank cage was only the first step, and there were still more than ten miles to go after going down to the end.

Colleagues often say that we have one step more here than other mines. There is a section of the road that requires a monkey car, and some mines do not have monkey cars.

The monkey car is a vertical pole with a bench, which is more like the kind of cable car that foreign people climb the snowy mountains. Why is it said to be a monkey car, because only one person can sit on a pole. People sit on poles and hold poles like a monkey holding a tree, and most colleagues don't like monkey cars. Because the monkey cart is rickety, the monkey cart will take us up a long downhill road.

After the downhill road is smooth, the monkey car is at the end.

Then came the subway, which my colleagues often say is the real subway.

I'm ashamed that the first time I saw the railroad tracks was not on land, but underground.

There are trams on the tracks, which run parallel to each other. Sit on it and send it deep into the mine, a distance of more than ten miles to the place where we work.

It is estimated that people who have not seen it with their own eyes will not believe that there is a subway hundreds or even kilometers underground, and this subway is terrifyingly long.

My favorite part of the road is to take the subway, because I can take a break for more than 10 minutes on this road.

I often fall asleep on the train, and sometimes I feel like I'm about to start working as soon as my eyes are closed. But sometimes I feel like I've been asleep for a long time, but when I open my eyes again, I find that I've only been walking for less than a few minutes.

Almost all of them choose to sleep on the tram and close their eyes to recuperate, because they are about to start working. And when you work, you must be mentally sufficient, otherwise any mistake may endanger your life.

At the beginning of the work, a colleague in front of me first shot an eye with a gangue gun.

Plan out the work area, followed by the firing of the cannons.

It is to blow up the roadway with explosives, and after the explosion, it is time to start working.

I was in charge of digging, and the sea behind me and a master were in charge of building the support.

It was a large shed made of hydraulic machines that was placed above my head to prevent the coal mine from collapsing.

This work must be done by skilled people, and it requires a very tacit cooperation. In case of an accident, support is our last guarantee, whether we can return safely from the mine depends on support.

A hydraulic platform composed of supports is built in the roadway little by little, and then the matter is simple.

Everyone came out of the tunnel and put the special coal cutter inside.

When the machine is in operation, it will move forward to harvest the coal and then pull it out with a scraper.

That's all the process of digging coal, attaching a belt to the transfer machine.

After pulling the coal mine out, it's not our business.

I heard from the master in the mine that I was lucky, and the people who went to the mine in the early years didn't have these machines.

The support needs to be put out little by little by hand. Coal mines must also be dug one by one, one hand at a time. Then it was pushed out and transported to the warehouse.

Every time I said this, the master would always let me see his hands.

The ravines in the cracks in the palms, the black coal mines have become textures. Something that becomes something like a tattoo in the palm of your hand can't be removed in this life.

I estimate that honeycomb coal is not very common now, but there is a huge demand for industrial coal.

What you don't know is that there are still more than 5 million coal miners in China, and that's just the number on the surface. There may be more actual employees, and some temporary workers and black workers are unlikely to appear on the form to be recorded.

When I was 14 years old, I started working in this industry, and I was one of the black workers at that time.

In a flash, he worked under the mine for ten whole years, and there were more conscious days in the mine than in the mine every day.

We know in our hearts that there are more and more new energy sources now. There are fewer and fewer coal mines, and it is likely that everyone will be out of work by the end of the day.

Of course, there are other minerals that we can dig for, but we have been digging coal for so many years. We all know that digging coal is the easiest, and we hope that the day when we don't have a job will never come up.