Ngoan has no land. Her home, in a remote northern district of Vietnam, is a ramshackle bamboo and mud hut and hungry mouths depend on the few grains of gold she can find.

Each morning she picks up a shovel, a small hoe and a wooden box for gold panning and heads to the edge of the nearby river.

For the rest of the day she sifts through sand, earth and pebbles for minuscule crumbs of gold, and if lucky she finds enough to buy a few kilograms of rice.

But if caught, Ngoan could be fined as gold panning here is now illegal."They stopped the gold digging and we worry about hunger as there is no land," Ngoan said. "We're very hungry."

Since the mid-1980s, Ngoan's home commune of Luong Thuong in Na Ri district, a remote mountain area 230 km (144 miles) North of Hanoi, has gonefrom boom to bust.

The country's faltering economy and a gradual loosening of communist control led people to look to gold -- a safer bet than crisis-ridden banks and the rapidly devaluing dong currency.

Over the years, gold lured thousands of people who streamed to this impoverished corner of what is now Bac Kan province.

Others were recruited by the `buong' or illegal mineowners, with the promise of a regular wage.

They dug the land, and what was once a fertile rice-growing highland valley is now devastated, laid to waste in the relentless pursuit of riches.

"There were many people, oh God, uncountable! They were working all the areas here...I don't know how much they earned, but now they've all gone," Ngoan said.

Officials said 25 per cent of the cultivated land had been destroyed, and was unlikely ever to support rice growing again.

"It was like a battlefield," one local person said. Others used the analogy of an apocalyptic B52 raid. Craters up to 20 metres deep would be worked by gangs ofup to 100 labourers.

The sound of water pumps cut across the still mountain air, while people dressed in rags worked up to their waists in muddy water digging and sifting by hand.

Last June, the first in a series of clampdowns saw officials swoop to release around 80 children found working in the pits.

This was followed at the end of the year with an order from the prime minister to stamp out illegal gold mining in Na Ri, as well as the southern provinces of Quang Nam and Dong Nai, which suffered similar problems.

"We had a working group comprised of police, army and other organisations," said Nong Van Lung, vice chairman of Na Ri district.

"We completely finished the operation by December 31, 1997.If we can catch anyone now it's the very poor people who return to search through the second-hand sands," he added.

Now the craters are abandoned and, without pumps, have filled with water. Broken ceramics or old clothes are all that remain on the mountains of pebbles where once bamboo shacks housedpool tables, opium dens or prostitutes.

Old floating barges designed to mechanically dredge the river bed, testament to the most ambitious of the buong, are abandoned.

Where well-stocked shops once lined Luong Thuong's dusty main street, houses are now padlocked and boarded. Where once people bustled, mangy dogs now scratch lazily in the afternoon shade. Bac Kan provincial vice chairman Leng Van Ty was candid, and recognised that with the miners gone, land destroyed and a blanket ban on prospecting there were mounting social problems.

"Some local people do not have jobs in the gold areas, but we are still determined to clear the site and not let any private organisations come back to dig," Ty said.