One wedding ring's journey from makeshift mine to fiancée’s finger-VIDEO

I stayed with him for the rest of the day, watching him work. Wearing flip-flops and no gloves, Bonsu would crush the gold-mercury balls into a powder. He’d then gather the powder in a metal bowl, add nitric acid and put it into the enclosed oven. After 10 minutes, other metals like copper and silver would dissolve into the acid, which he’d dilute in a bucket of water. After several customers, he’d filled the bucket with acid and took it outside to dump directly onto the ground.

He then cooked the gold powder over the open fire to get rid of the mercury. Finally, he put the refined gold into a clay cup with some borax to lower its melting temperature and buried it in the coals of the fire, turning on a fan to make it burn even hotter.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/08/09/one_wedding_rings_journey_from_makeshift_mine_to_fiances_finger.html