Wai and 78 other co-workers were trapped underground after the 1997 magnitude 7.8 earthquake that hit the region and caused the wooden support structure of the mine to crumble and collapse some large sections of the tunnels.
The other workers have long died but Wai miraculously survived.
The western province miners stumbled upon Wai, when the gallery they were excavating opened up on a section of an old mine.
They said Wai was in a bad shape when they found him, adding that he had been taken to the hospital for a complete evaluation of his physical and mental states.
Meanwhile, Wai was saved by the fact that some ventilation duct still connected his underground prison to the surface, allowing him access to air that was sufficiently pure to keep him alive.
He, however, stayed alive by eating the emergency stash of rice and water, stored in an underground depot for this kind of incident, feeding on the rats in the mine, and also collecting large quantities of some sort of phosphorescent moss, which constituted his only source of vitamins.
Wai's case constitutes a world record due to the universally recognized authority on record-breaking achievement, Guinness. The former record for surviving underground was 142 days and was held by a British man named Geoff Smith, who buried himself in the backyard of the Railway Inn with the intention of breaking a world record.
Mining accidents have killed over 4000 miners a year at the beginning of the millennium, but the country's government has put in place measures to curb the disaster as they have been clamping down on unregulated mining operations, which account for almost 80 percent of the country’s 16,000 mines.
According to government statistics, the shutting down of about 1,000 dangerous small mines last year has reduced the numbers of miners killed in a day to six in the first months of this year.
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