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Rescuers were searching for victims of a huge mine landslide in northern Myanmar Monday as the toll topped 100 in a disaster highlighting the perils of the country's secretive billion-dollar jade trade, according to AFP.

Authorities in the remote town of Hpakant, the epicentre of the world's production of highly valuable jade, have pulled scores of bodies from the earth since a huge mountain of debris collapsed onto dozens of flimsy shacks early on Saturday morning.

Those killed are thought to be mainly itinerant workers, who scratch a living picking through the piles of waste left by large-scale industrial mining firms in the hope of stumbling across a previously missed hunk of jade that will deliver them from poverty.

The landslide is thought to be the deadliest in recent memory in the hard to reach and impoverished area of northern Kachin state bordering China, with the official toll reaching 104 according to the Global New Light of Myanmar.

The state-backed newspaper said "many more people are still missing" after the accident, although authorities have said they did not know precisely how many people had been living in the area.

"The rescue operation is ongoing today and we are still collecting bodies. We have found more than a hundred," Dashi Naw Lawn, secretary of the Kachin Network Development Foundation, a community group involved in the rescue operation, told AFP.