Phuket Mining Museum

Discover the tin mining era of Phuket

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Phuket Mining Museum (or Kathu Mining Museum) was built with unusual grandeur in a remote and isolated location behind the Loch Palm Golf Club of Kathu, somewhere in the hills before Patong. Phuket’s museums are not precisely living spaces where artists exhibit their creations, but this one gives you a pretty good vision of what Phuket was famous for during the tin mining era.

Driving through the Phuket Mining Museum’s massive double arch entrance gate and along the lake will lead you to a monumental Sino-Portuguese pink building. When approaching, you might start having high expectations, and the creators probably had them too, looking at the many shopping push-karts abandoned around the parking.

Designers put a great deal of effort into recreating the feel of the mining era throughout the architecture and exhibits, which is undoubtedly impressive. Equally, the items on display in the several rooms result from long research, but a large part of the museum is too specialised to grab the attention unless you are also passionate about mining history.

The third part is more entertaining with a small reproduction of an old Phuket town with barges, shops, workshops and even some scarier wax full-size figures smoking opium on a bed behind a door. A bit creepy, but I was alone. There was no one but me in the entire museum.

One of the three highlights in the Phuket Mining Museum is the scaled model of a mine with a hundred figurines at work, probably the most photographed part of the museum. The second would be the caves with prehistoric wax men hidden behind corners, perhaps to scare you.

Mining Techniques

Shaft mining

Shaft mining (Drifting) is an underground mining technique for placer deposits with a thick overburden and no ores at an overburden depth. It uses workers to open a small square shaft padded with wood plank liners and install it with a man-powered derrick to lift up soil and rock-ore mixture onto the ground level. Underground tunnels were being constructed while air ventilation shafts were built simultaneously to allow adequate air circulation in the mine. Mine workers may light candles in the tunnels to monitor the oxygen level for labourers to breathe.

Open-cut mining

Open-cut mining, also known as surface mining or open-pit mining, is a surface mining technique/ open pit mining technique used for placer deposits located in the nearby hillside. A surface soil layer is drilled or exploded to allow access to the ore-containing soil layer, then using workers, backhoes, mine loaders, and trucks to haul ore-containing soil into the ore cleaning process in an ore processing plant. Ore-containing rocks must be ground into pieces using an ore-grinding mill before being conveyed to the wooden trough to wash and collect the ores.

Hydraulic mining

Hydraulic mining is an open pit mining technique used with placer deposits using a hydraulic elevator to pump ores into a palong or into a “jig”, mineral processing equipment, utilising water retained in a water reservoir on the high ground to give the power needed for ore-containing soil pumping instead of using a gravel pump. Hydraulic mining has a significantly lower operating cost, but it needs a high investment cost to build a weir and water piping system.

Ground sluicing

Ground sluicing is an open mine technique used for residual deposit sites or hill sides using human power or pumping water through monitors to break the mine front and let mineral-containing soil flow along with water through ditches through palongs. This kind of mining was often seen in operation during the rainy season and was suitable for investors who had a small fund.

Once you walk through the whole Phuket Mining Museum building, which doesn’t take long despite its size, you can explore the park and look at some other mining remains and machine spare parts, as well as a beautiful view of the nearby hills.

Overall, it may not be impressive, but the history is interesting, and you must admire the effort that went into making it. However, despite being open since 2008, the venue has failed to attract tourists, and signs of neglect have started to show. Building closer to Patong might have made this place more successful, but even the road leading to the Mining Museum is in bad shape. I would, therefore, recommend it to those passionate about Phuket’s past times and history or on your list of Things to Do in Phuket when it rains for a long time.

Immigration of the Phuket population

Before it became a tourist city, phuket was a town that prospered from the tin trade. Tin demand worldwide triggered a flood of immigrants looking for an opportunity in the mining business, especially Fujian Chinese people (called Hokkien people by Thai pronunciation) from both nearby countries like Singapore and Penang, or from China itself. These Chinese people made their settlements in phuket and blended their own culture into the local culture that provided uniqueness in this region, such as Chino-Portuguese architecture, local cuisines, local garbs, and local tradition and culture that the locals love and hold dear, inherit from one generation to another thus resulting in its magical charm today.

More photos of the Phuket Mining Museum