11th and 19th centuries, until a European miner named Felix Tegengren arrived to find the Chinese industry in shambles. Tegengren notes that ironsand was sluice mined in Henan and Fujian by local farmers and smelted over charcoal fires to make tools, but it involved a lot of work thus was very expensive. It was only smelted where there was enough wood for the fires and cheaper steel was not readily available. Therefore, the material was considered to be economically unimportant in China. However, because the mining was safe, outdoor work, it was practiced by local farmers to supplement their income wherever it was available; in the 19th century 1000 pounds of sluiced sand typically sold for the equivalent of 50 to 60 US dollars (by 2016 exchange rates ~ 900--1000 dollars or 700--800 euros). However, in the modern age ironsand is placer mined along China's southeast coast and used for smelting steel. The typical composition of this ironsand is 48.88% metallic iron, 25.84% silica, 0.232% phosphorus, and 0.052% sulfur. Indonesia In Indonesia, iron sand is prevalent on the south coast of Java island. Japan Large scale mining was not practiced in Japan until the 7th or 8th centuries. Prior to this, metals were commonly imported into Japan from China and Korea. Deposits of iron ore are thought to have been scarce in Japan, so, around the 8th century, iron-making technology developed with the use of ironsand (satetsu) as the raw ingredient. Because of the loose nature of the sand it was difficult to smelt in a normal bloomery, or to use in a blast furnace to make pig iron, so the Japanese developed an open-topped bloomery called a tatara. The tatara was built with a low, tub-like shape, resembling a horizontal blast-furnace, into which ironsand could be poured and contained, and smelted in stages. Unlike with other methods, the charcoal was piled on top of the sand and smelted from above, keeping it from being blown about by the blasts from the bellows. Instead of brick or stone, the tatara was made of clay so that it could simply be broken apart to extract the metal bloom. This method allowed smelting of much higher volumes of ore than other types of bloomery smelting. The ironsand in Japan comes in two forms. Masa ironsand is found mixed with quartz sand that washes down from granite mountains. The magnetite in the sand