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.
Phonetic 必 bì, for the 'bi-' of bismuth.
This character is used for the element and little else — you are unlikely to meet it outside a chemistry classroom.
The element itself
Bismuth grows the most beautiful crystals of any common element: cooled slowly, it forms stepped, hollow, staircase-like hopper crystals, and a thin oxide film on the surface splits light into rainbow colours. It is also the most strongly diamagnetic metal, meaning it is faintly repelled by any magnetic field. For most of the twentieth century it was listed as the heaviest stable element, until measurements in 2003 caught it decaying after all — with a half-life about a billion times longer than the age of the universe, which is stable enough for any practical purpose.
Where it sits among the 118
Bismuth is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
Where it comes from in China
Bismuth rarely justifies a mine of its own and mostly rides along with tungsten, molybdenum and lead. In China that means the Nanling belt, above all Shizhuyuan in Hunan, where a granite baked its limestone wall rock into a skarn carrying tungsten, tin, molybdenum and bismuth together in one body. The one place bismuth comes close to being the main event is Dashuigou in Sichuan, and even there it plays second to tellurium.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铋Bismuth in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.