Road shut down in China by hundreds of people who mistakenly thought they were picking up gold dust

There is an interesting phenomenon that we’ve seen in a few stories out of China. It appears sometimes when a transport vehicle spills some of its cargo, a group of people comes out of the woodwork to grab some of whatever landed on the road be it baby chickens, crabs, oranges, or grapes.

However, this time there’s gold in them thar spillages which of course led to sticky fingers on an unprecedented level. However, if anyone happened to notice a disturbance in the force recently, it was probably the sound of 100 or so voices crying out at once upon learning that their booty was not actually gold but something far stinkier.

The incident occurred on the morning of 26 August when pedestrians around the intersection of National Highway 108 and Xinxing North Road in Shaanxi noticed something yellowish and glittery scattered around the asphalt. Remembering that age-old Smash Mouth proverb “all that glitters is goh-old” people set out to collect the discarded gold dust.

It got to the point where dozens of people at a time could been seen crouching around the intersection as if everyone had suddenly lost their contacts all at once. Traffic in the area was brought to a standstill and police couldn’t fend off the inflow of these urban prospectors in such numbers. The entire happening lasted from about 6 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The whole ordeal could have been averted if someone had only informed those people that they were actually picking up sulfur powder rather than gold. It seems that some of the yellow multipurpose dust had scattered while getting loaded onto a truck in the vicinity. Sadly, since sulfur powder retails for about ten bucks a pound on Amazon, there isn’t much chance of those people turning a profit on their findings.

On the bright side, in its powdered form and in such small amounts sulfur isn’t very dangerous. Luckily it didn’t turn out to be something more hazardous like lead monoxide, yellowcake uranium, or – god forbid – turmeric.

Source: Xinhuaxia News, Toychan
Images: You Xinqi

Origin: Road shut down in China by hundreds of people who mistakenly thought they were picking up gold dust
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