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.
An ancient word rather than a coinage, and the reason a pencil is a 铅笔 in Chinese just as it is a 'lead' pencil in English.
Where you actually meet it
铅笔 (qiānbǐ) — pencil
The element itself
Lead is soft, dense, low-melting and smelts easily out of galena, which is why it is one of the oldest worked metals and why traces of ancient smelting show up in Greenland ice cores. Its most remarkable scientific use is dating: lead is the end product of both uranium and thorium decay, so the isotopic mix in a sample records how much of each has decayed since it formed. Measuring that mix in meteorite material in the 1950s finally gave a solid figure for the age of the Earth — about four and a half billion years — after a century of arguing.
Where it sits among the 118
Lead is one of the fourteen elements that were known before anyone was keeping records of who found what.
In living things
Lead has no biological role whatever, and its harm comes from being mistaken for the metals that do. It slips into sites meant for calcium and zinc, often binding more tightly than the intended ion, and it interferes with the enzyme chain that assembles heme. Most of what the body absorbs ends up substituted into the mineral of bone, where it can sit for decades and be released again when bone is remodelled — so exposure is not a single event but a long tail. Leaded petrol, the largest source of the modern dispersal, was phased out country by country over several decades and has now been abandoned essentially everywhere; lead in older paint and plumbing has been much slower to disappear.
In Chinese history and language
Chinese ritual bronze is usually not a two-metal alloy at all but a copper-tin-lead ternary, and the lead is deliberate: it makes the melt run thin and sharp into the deep, crowded ornament that Shang casting is famous for. Lead had a parallel career in the laboratory, where 铅 qiān and 汞 gǒng — lead and mercury — were the standing yin-yang pair of the alchemists, so thoroughly that 铅汞 came to stand for the whole art. The modern word is a small joke at the expense of both traditions: 铅笔 qiānbǐ, "lead pencil", contains no lead.
Where it comes from in China
Lead travels with zinc, so the map is the same one: Jinding at Lanping and the carbonate-hosted deposits of the Yunnan–Sichuan–Guizhou triangle. Lead has a much longer history in China than that, though — bronzes of the Shang and Zhou are often heavily leaded on purpose, because lead makes molten bronze run more freely and fill every detail of a piece mould. Where the lead in those particular vessels was mined is still an open question among archaeologists.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
铅Lead in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.