Ingichka: The Tungsten Town That Outlived Its Mine
Ingichka, 30 km from Kattakurgan, mined tungsten for the USSR from the 1940s to 1996. What the records say about the mine, the closure and the 2022 restart.
About three per cent of the Soviet Union's tungsten concentrate came out of one hill 30 km south-west of Kattakurgan. That figure is a US Bureau of Mines estimate for 1986, which put the Ingichke mining complex (the report's spelling) at 471 tonnes of concentrate a year, behind only Tyrny-Auz in the Caucasus, Vostok-2 in the Far East and Dzhida in Transbaikal. Ten years later the mine shut. The settlement built around it, Ingichka, is still there, and since 2022 it has been producing tungsten again, this time from its own waste heaps.
Nobody has written this place up for a general reader in English, Russian or Uzbek. What follows is pieced together from the Bureau of Mines study, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a 2025 mining-industry survey, Uzbek government and company announcements, and two 2025 and 2026 research papers on the tailings. Where those sources disagree, the disagreement is printed.
A wartime discovery
Tungsten hardens steel. In 1941 the Soviet Union needed a great deal of hardened steel, and the US Bureau of Mines' 1988 study of Soviet tungsten (hosted by the University of North Texas Digital Library) records that exploration was renewed during the war and that "Ingichke in Central Asia" was among the deposits found then; it gives 1940 to 1947 as the exploration period. A 2025 Kazakh mining-industry survey, dprom.kz, dates the working life of the mine as 1941 to 1996. A local account repeated in a 2025 research paper puts the discovery on 22 June 1941, the day Germany invaded; we could not open that paper to confirm the line, so treat the exact date as tradition and the year as fact.
The ore is scheelite, a calcium tungstate, sitting in skarn where granodiorite met marble on the south-east flank of the Zirabulak hills. The Bureau of Mines describes three ore bodies more than 800 m deep and calls Ingichke the largest deposit in the Southern Ore Belt of Central Asia; a 2024 paper from the Karshi Engineering-Economic Institute, on Uzbekistan's tungsten raw-material base, places it 28 km by road from Kattakurgan railway station.
The settlement came with the mine. Until 1959 it was simply called Rudnik Ingichka, "Ingichka Mine"; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia's entry gives it 7,000 inhabitants in 1970 and one line of economy: tungsten ore extraction. The Soviet censuses show the population climbing to roughly 9,500 by 1979 and about 9,700 in 1989, the last count before everything changed. No later official figure turned up in our search.
What the mine was like
Everything was underground. The Bureau of Mines says mining used the cut-and-fill method, that in 1963 the ore ran 0.38 to 0.57 per cent tungsten trioxide (average 0.43), and that in 1978 the average dilution, waste rock hauled up with the ore, was 58.5 per cent. Labour productivity was low because, in the report's words, up to 80 per cent of the work was done by hand.
The concentrator was the point of the place. The first plant started in 1951, the same year as the Skopin mill near Moscow, during the fifth five-year plan. A new flotation plant installed in 1972 and 1973 roughly doubled its capacity and made it, the report thinks, the fourth-largest tungsten concentrator in the Soviet Union. A November 2025 paper on the tailings (Yusupov, Khasanov and Boymurodov, on Zenodo) gives the new plant's start as 1 June 1973 and its throughput as 1,765 tonnes of ore a day. The high-grade scheelite concentrate went by rail to the Chirchik alloys plant outside Tashkent to be turned into rods, wire and high-temperature alloys.
One detail in the 1988 study reads differently now. It noted that when Ingichke was depleted, the concentrator "could continue to process ore from the Yakhtin and Karatyube deposits". The deposit did run down, and nobody fed the plant anything else.
| Year | Event | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1940–47 | Deposit found and explored during the war (local account: June 1941) | US Bureau of Mines 1988 |
| 1951 | First concentrator in operation | US Bureau of Mines 1988 |
| 1959 | Settlement renamed from Rudnik Ingichka to Ingichka | Great Soviet Encyclopedia |
| 1972–73 | New flotation plant, capacity doubled; 1,765 t/day | USBM 1988; Yusupov et al. 2025 |
| 1986 | ~471 t concentrate, ~3% of Soviet output (estimate) | US Bureau of Mines 1988 |
| 1996 | Mining stops: world prices too low | dprom.kz 2025; USGS 2025 |
| 2022 | First tungsten from the tailings, 100 t/yr | yuz.uz, 30 Aug 2022 |
| 2024–25 | Capacity 285 t/yr, then a Xinhai partnership targeting 1,050 t | dprom.kz 2025; MINEX Nov 2025 |
1996: the price, not the rock
The mine did not run out of ore. The dprom.kz survey says about 11 million tonnes of reserves were left when work stopped in 1996, and gives the reason as low metal prices on world markets. The US Geological Survey's 2025 open-file report on Uzbekistan's tungsten endowment says the same thing of Ingichke and Koytash together: production between the 1940s and the 1990s, stopped in the mid-1990s because low prices made it unprofitable. Tungsten was cheap for a decade after the Soviet collapse, and a mine where most of the work was manual could not carry it.
What that did to a settlement of nearly 10,000 people built for one employer is the part no source describes. We found no census figure, no hokimiyat page and no reportage from the 1996 to 2022 gap. If you have been there, our contact page is open; this is the kind of post that gets corrected by readers.
The restart, from the waste heaps
Fifty-five years of flotation left roughly 12 million tonnes of tailings on the hillside, and the Soviet process had not recovered all the metal. In 2022 the deposit was handed to Almalyk Mining and Metallurgical Combine's technological-metals arm, and on 30 August 2022 the state news agency reported the first tungsten product from the Ingichka waste: 100 tonnes a year of concentrate, at a market price it quoted as US$40 a kilogram of tungsten, and 150 new jobs. The dprom.kz survey counts the jobs differently, 82 in the first phase and 120 more when the second phase lifted capacity to 285 tonnes a year in summer 2024. Either way the plant occupies the "unused buildings of the former Ingichka pilot-technological expedition", which is to say the old works.
Then the numbers started climbing. In March 2025 the president reviewed 18 projects for deepening the processing of Ingichka concentrate, part of a US$2.6 billion rare-metals programme (Gazeta.uz, 10 March 2025). A November 2025 industry briefing on the Technological Metals Complex describes a partnership with China's Xinhai to lift Ingichka's concentrate output to 1,050 tonnes, worth a projected US$18.4 million a year, inside a national plan to go from 300 to 14,950 tonnes of concentrate by 2030. In October 2026 Trend reported a plan to put 1.95 million tonnes of the waste through the plant in 2027. A presidential decision of 27 December 2025 on Samarkand region's development (PQ-392 on lex.uz) lists tungsten among the mineral resources of the I. Shoir mahalla at Ingichka under the heading of metallurgy for Kattakurgan city.
The geology has a twist of its own. The Bureau of Mines knew Ingichke as a scheelite deposit. A June 2026 paper on the tailings (Shodiyev, Dononov and Safarov, Zenodo) found the tungsten left in the waste is mostly hübnerite, a manganese tungstate, with scheelite only minor, and that it concentrates in the finest fraction, under a tenth of a millimetre. Radiometric sorting did not work on it; gravity and high-intensity magnetic separation did. That is the material the new plant is chasing.
Going to look
Ingichka is an easy detour and a strange one. Kattakurgan is a stop on the Samarkand to Bukhara line: in the timetable Yandex shows for October 2026, Afrosiyob train 766 leaves Tashkent at 07:30, Samarkand at 09:53 and pauses at Kattakurgan-Pass for two minutes at 10:25, with Navoi and Bukhara beyond. Check the current timetable on the booking site before you rely on it; our notes on the Afrosiyob explain how the stops and classes work. From the station a taxi covers the 28 to 30 km south-west into the Zirabulak hills in about 40 minutes; agree the fare and the wait before you set off, since there is no traffic back.
What you will find is a working industrial site, not a ruin, with the tailings terraces above a Soviet grid town. It is private property with a security post, so ask before pointing a camera at the plant; the hills and the town are open. There is nowhere obvious to eat, so bring something from the bazaar in Kattakurgan, which is also a reasonable place to break the Samarkand to Bukhara journey if you want a town that no tour passes through. For the wider map of how these one-industry places sit between the Silk Road cities, the Kyzylkum and Nurata guides cover the ground to the north.
What we could not establish
- The 22 June 1941 discovery date appears only in a search extract of the 2025 Zenodo paper, which blocked our download. The Bureau of Mines' 1940–47 window is the citable version.
- The population after 1989. The 1944 settlement-status date and the 1959 to 1989 census figures circulate in encyclopaedias; we cite the Great Soviet Encyclopedia for 1970 and treat the rest as approximate.
- When underground mining actually began. The Bureau of Mines hedges with "may have started in the early 1960s" and is sure only of 1973, while dprom.kz and the USGS count the working life from the 1940s; surface or exploration workings in the 1940s and 1950s would reconcile the two, but no source says so.
- Whether 1996 was a hard stop or a wind-down; dprom.kz and the USGS agree on "mid-1990s, price-driven" and nothing more.
- Job numbers at the restart: 150 (yuz.uz, 2022) versus 82 plus 120 (dprom.kz, 2025). Both are printed above.
Ingichka's story will be rewritten by the plant on the hill. If the 2030 targets hold, this hill will be back near the top of the country's tungsten output, and the town that waited twenty-six years for its mine will have got something close to it back.