Rescuers search for people killed by landslide at Hpa Kant jade mining area, Kachin State, northern Myanmar on 21 November 2015.
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More people are missing, the Global New Light of Myanmar newspaper reported.
A local resident told the paper that the death toll may reach more than 100.
According to the BBC, numerous dead were people living near the waste dumps who had been searching through the dump site in the hope of finding fragments of jade to sell.
He said rows of bodies were pulled from the debris.
He said that “scores of people at a time are buried alive in landslides”.
Myanmar is home to a few of the world’s highest quality jade. In April, nine miners died in a landslide in Hpakant town, while another four died in Phakant in January. “Nobody knows for sure how many and where they had come from”.
In an October report, advocacy group Global Witness estimated that the value of jade produced in 2014 alone was US$31 billion (Dh113.85bn) – the equivalent of almost half the country’s GDP.
It was unclear as to what triggered the landslide in the remote and mountainous region that is nearly entirely off limits to foreigners.
Last week, it was announced that Aung San Suu Kyi’s opposition party has won a majority in Myanmar’s parliament.
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After Myanmar’s former military rulers handed over power to a nominally civilian government five years ago, resulting in the lifting of many Western sanctions, the already rapid pace of mining turned frenetic.
