Iwami Ginzan

A third of the world’s silver once came through these hills

The largest silver mine in Japanese history, worked for almost four hundred years from its discovery in 1526 until it closed in 1923, in the hills above Ōda in Shimane. A merchant named Kamiya Jutei opened it and brought in a Korean refining method, the haifukiho, that made the ore pay. At its peak in the early 1600s it produced around 38 tonnes of silver a year, at a time when Japan was producing about 200 tonnes and that was a third of all the silver in the world. Warlords fought over it until the Tokugawa took it in 1600 after Sekigahara and fenced it off. What survives is not just the tunnels but the whole landscape that served them, the roads, ports and settlements, listed together by UNESCO in 2007.