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.
One of the five metals known in antiquity (金银铜铁锡), so the character long predates the element-naming system.
Where you actually meet it
铜牌 (tóngpái) bronze medal
The element itself
Copper was the first metal worked in quantity, largely because it occasionally turns up as native metal — lumps of usable copper lying in the rock, needing only hammering. The Keweenaw Peninsula on Lake Superior held some of the purest native copper anywhere, worked for thousands of years before industrial mining arrived. Almost all copper today comes instead from porphyry deposits, vast low-grade bodies where a cooling intrusion cracked the rock above it and shot copper-bearing fluid through every fracture; the mines that work them, mostly in the Andes and the American Southwest, are among the largest holes humans have dug.
Where it sits among the 118
Copper is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In living things
Copper takes over from iron at the very end of the respiratory chain, where copper centres in cytochrome c oxidase deliver the electrons that finally reduce oxygen to water. It also carries oxygen outright in a whole branch of the animal kingdom: molluscs and many arthropods use haemocyanin instead of haemoglobin, which is why an octopus or a horseshoe crab bleeds blue. And it is the metal of connective tissue — lysyl oxidase, a copper enzyme, forges the cross-links that turn loose collagen and elastin into something with tensile strength.
In Chinese history and language
From the Qin down to the last Qing issues, Chinese money was a round copper-alloy coin with a square hole, strung by the thousand on a cord — 铜钱 tóngqián, two millennia of essentially one design. Working money was heavy, dirty and smelled of oxidising metal, which gave the language 铜臭 tóngxiù, "the stink of copper", the classical sneer for a man whose only distinction is his money. Copper's other life is ritual rather than commercial: the Shang cast bronze 鼎 dǐng, and 问鼎 wèndǐng, "to ask about the tripods", still means to make a bid for supreme power.
Where it comes from in China
Copper turns up in three quite different Chinese settings: the porphyry deposit at Dexing in Jiangxi, the Yulong belt in eastern Tibet, and the old workings at Tonglüshan in Hubei. Yulong is the geologically interesting one, because porphyry copper normally forms above a subduction zone and this belt formed instead in the continental collision that raised the plateau. Tonglüshan is the historically interesting one — timber-framed shafts and galleries survive there from the Bronze Age, sunk by people supplying the metal for ritual vessels.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铜Copper in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.