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
锰钢 (měnggāng) manganese steel
The element itself
Steel cannot really be made without manganese, which scavenges sulfur and oxygen out of the melt and would be missed long before anyone missed the alloying effect. Its most extraordinary occurrence is on the deep seafloor, where manganese oxide precipitates around a fragment of shell or shark tooth to form potato-sized nodules that carpet parts of the abyssal plain — growing at a few millimetres per million years, which makes a fist-sized nodule older than the human genus by a wide margin.
Where it sits among the 118
First isolated in 1774.
In living things
Every oxygen molecule you have ever breathed came off a cluster of four manganese atoms and one calcium. It sits on the sunlit side of photosystem II in plants, algae and cyanobacteria, and it is the only thing in nature that can strip the electrons out of water and let the oxygen go — storing four oxidising equivalents, one photon at a time, before releasing O₂ in a single step. The same element also works in the dark: mitochondria protect themselves with a manganese-containing superoxide dismutase, and the enzyme that closes the urea cycle in the liver is a manganese enzyme too.
Where it comes from in China
Manganese in China points to the Datangpo beds of eastern Guizhou and western Hunan, and their story is about the whole planet rather than one province. They were laid down immediately after a Snowball Earth glaciation, when an ocean that had spent ages sealed beneath ice — stagnant, oxygen-free, carrying dissolved manganese it had no way to shed — met the air again and dropped its load. Manganese only stays dissolved while oxygen is absent, so a manganese bed is usually the record of an ocean changing state.
The full entry
For stroke order, example sentences, audio and the complete set of meanings, see the dictionary entry.
锰Manganese in the dictionary →Others built the same way
Every one of these carries 钅, and every one is a metal.