Precise and rapid determination of total mercury in ore samples has been performed using a direct mercury analyzer without any wet chemical sample pretreatment. Once a weighed sample portion was introduced into the instrument, analysis can be completed in less than six minutes. The detection limit of the method was 0.60 ng/g for mercury and the recoveries of this method were 90.0 %~109.0 % with the precision of 0.95%~4.74% RSD (n=8). The results of mercury for six kinds of ore reference materials were in good agreement with the certified values.