How the character is built
The 金 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.
Gold is the radical itself — the component that marks almost every other metal on the table. The one exception is 汞 (mercury), which takes 水 instead.
Where you actually meet it
金子 (jīnzi) — gold
The element itself
Gold is chemically almost inert, and that single fact explains its geology: while other metals weather into solution and wash away, gold survives as metal and gets sorted by moving water into the placers that every gold rush began with. The largest concentration on Earth is a fossil version of exactly that — the Witwatersrand of South Africa, a sequence of ancient river gravels nearly three billion years old, buried and tilted, which has yielded a large fraction of all the gold ever mined. Most modern production is far less romantic: microscopic grains disseminated through rock, invisible to the eye and recoverable only chemically.
Where it sits among the 118
Gold is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In Chinese history and language
金 jīn is the radical stamped across most of this table, and in the oldest texts it did not mean gold at all — it meant metal, which in the Shang and Zhou meant bronze. That is why inscriptions cast into ritual vessels are called 金文 jīnwén, "metal writing". The traditional 五金 wǔjīn, the Five Metals, are usually given as gold, silver, copper, iron and tin, and that ancient list survives in the most ordinary sign on a modern street: 五金店 wǔjīndiàn, the hardware shop. A learner meets the Five Metals long before chemistry, in the word for a place that sells hinges and screws.
Where it comes from in China
More Chinese gold comes from the Jiaodong peninsula in Shandong than from anywhere else in the country, in lodes threading Mesozoic granite along a set of major faults. The reason is dramatic: in the Cretaceous the deep root beneath the ancient North China craton was destroyed and replaced, and the resulting flood of magma and fluid built a great gold province in crust that had been stable and quiet for two billion years. The ore bodies are narrow and steep, and some of the shafts now reach well over a kilometre down.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
金Gold in the dictionary →