Building a road with basket backpacks - GIF

[Unkle Fuzzy]

Many years ago, 20 years or so, my employer entered into an agreement with China to mine bentonite clay. This company is the world's largest producer of said clay and had praced a reserve order of $10 million with Caterpillar for new equipment to start the mine's production. Upon closing the deal we found that we had to cancel the contract because the Chinese government wanted to mine it with manual labor. Picks, shovels, and wheel barrows.... eventually we were able to get them to understand the actual volume we expected to come out of the mine and equipment was allowed but as a matter of policy manual labor is how projects like this are done in that region.

My father-in-law was in Korea in the late 50's and an air base with runways was constructed after 2 mountains were leveled and the valley between filled in with rubble. All done by villagers with baskets.