How the character is built
The 钅 radical marks this as a metal, and that is not a coincidence of this one character — it holds right across the table. Read the radical first and the element's state at room temperature is already settled. It is 金 (jīn) squeezed into the space beside another component — radicals change shape by position, which is why 金 is hard to spot until you know to look for 钅.
Where you actually meet it
铝合金 (lǚhéjīn) aluminium alloy
The element itself
Aluminium is the most abundant metal in the crust and was, for a while in the nineteenth century, more precious than silver, because no one could economically separate it from the oxygen it clings to. Two young chemists working independently cracked it in the same year with electrolysis, and the price collapsed within a decade. Its ore, bauxite, is not really an ore in the usual sense but a residue: soil in the wet tropics that has been rained on for so long that everything soluble has been leached away, leaving the aluminium behind. Smelting it is still essentially a way of selling electricity in solid form.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1825.
In Chinese history and language
The green jade most Westerners picture is not the jade of Chinese antiquity. 翡翠 fěicuì, jadeite, is a sodium-aluminium silicate — a wholly different mineral from nephrite — and it came from Burma, arriving in real quantity only under the Qing. Its vivid emerald green and glassier polish made it fashionable late and made it expensive, with the odd result that the most valuable "Chinese jade" on the market today is the newcomer, while the millennia of ritual discs and burial suits are the older calcium-magnesium stone.
Where it comes from in China
Aluminium's Chinese geography is two things at once. The ore is karst bauxite in Shanxi, Henan, Guizhou and Guangxi: clay left behind as ancient limestone dissolved away beneath it, collecting in the hollows. And the element's most famous mineral carries a Chinese place name — kaolin, the white aluminium-silicate clay that makes porcelain, is named for Gaoling, a village near the kilns of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi where it was dug.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铝Aluminium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.