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
锂电池 (lǐdiànchí) lithium battery
The element itself
Lithium is the lightest metal there is, so light it would float on water if it were not busy reacting with it, and soft enough to cut with a knife. It comes from two very different places: hard granitic pegmatites, where it sits in the mineral spodumene, and salt flats in high desert basins, where lithium-bearing brine is pumped into ponds and left to evaporate under the sun for the better part of a year. The Andean salars and the salt lakes of the Qinghai–Tibet plateau are the same story — old drainage with nowhere to go, in air dry enough to concentrate what is dissolved in it.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1817.
Where it comes from in China
Lithium reaches China two ways. In the salt lakes of Qinghai, above all Qarhan, the brine is lithium-bearing but heavy with magnesium, and magnesium is a chemical near-twin of lithium that is stubbornly hard to separate from it — which held the resource back for years; Zabuye in Tibet is the exception, a rare carbonate-type lake where magnesium runs low. The other route is hard rock: spodumene from the pegmatites at Jiajika in western Sichuan, high enough in the mountains that the season is short, and lithium-bearing mica around Yichun in Jiangxi.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锂Lithium in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.