A leather belt cooked on a fire of old rubber, some paper and a bit of orange peel were the desperate meals that helped a band of trapped miners to survive underground for almost a week.

For six days, the 11 men hung on after sharing their “food” in the mine in Chengde, north of Beijing.

The miners, whose ordeal began last week when the iron and gold mines in which they were working collapsed, recounted their desperate but innovative means of surviving yesterday. They were pulled out alive early on Sunday after 129 hours underground, their nightmare prolonged because the owner of the illegal mine delayed reporting the incident to the authorities.

The first man to be rescued was Wu Pengyong, 33, who had found a job at the mine along with five friends two months earlier. He said a gust of wind in a tunnel and a rumble above his head alerted him to the danger. Then the power went off and he found himself trapped.

“At first we tried to dig a tunnel, but it soon collapsed and so we had to stop,” he said.

The men drank what water they could find in the mine. Food, however, soon became a problem. Mr Wu said they began eating a newspaper and three pages of a book. “But you can’t eat much of that. So then we ate orange peel. In the end we were really starving.”

That was when Mr Wu had an idea. “I had a leather belt. So I took this off and we cut it up into pieces. We used a rubber pipe to make a fire and tried to cook the leather in an empty [porridge] can. I boiled it but it wouldn’t cook so we just divided it up and ate it half-cooked.”

The miners said that they never gave up hope. They could hear the sound of drilling as rescuers tried to reach them and banged repeatedly on the wall to alert the outside world that they were still alive.

The owner’s failure to report the accident promptly severely delayed rescue efforts, state media said. Three days after the incident, local officials sent in 48 rescuers with special equipment, who worked round the clock in four shifts to find the men.

They were hampered by the chaotic network of tunnels and the absence of any map of the mine. The only clues to the location of the trapped men came from their colleagues who described the tunnels to the rescuers as they dug through the mine.

All the men are now recovering in hospital. Their rescue was a rare piece of good news from the world’s deadliest mines. The episode came as police began a manhunt for the owner of a coal mine in northern Shanxi province where the bodies of at least 105 people have been recovered after an explosion on Wednesday.

Among the dead were a number of rescuers. About 50 people with no rescue training were sent to find their trapped colleagues, but never resurfaced. The authorities have detained 33 mine managers and officials after they delayed reporting the accident for five hours and tried to launch their own abortive rescue operation.

In August, two brothers became mini-celebrities after they recounted how they clawed their way to the surface — surviving by drinking their own urine — after nearly six days trapped in a collapsed coal mine.

WASTE NOT . . .

— Natural hide is high in protein and as nourishing as a similar quantity of lean meat. Once this hide had been tanned to create a belt it would have little to no nutritional value and very little calorific content. Glue or dye would may have been toxic. Chewing would have assuaged hunger.

— The average male can last for 40 to 50 days without food. Boiling the belt would have increased its water content, and this was probably its greatest benefit.

Sources: Catherine Collins, Chief Dietitian at St George’s Hospital, London; sharingsustainablesolutions.org

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