China has discovered a rare gold deposit in the Kunlun Mountains near the western border of Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, according to government geologists involved in the survey.
Initial estimates suggest its total gold reserves could exceed 1,000 tonnes.
“The outline of a thousand-tonne-scale gold belt in West Kunlun, Xinjiang, is now taking shape,” wrote He Fubao, a senior engineer with the Kashgar Geological Team, and his colleagues in a paper published on November 4 in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Geoscientica Sinica.
This discovery marks the third gold deposit with the potential to surpass the 1,000-tonne threshold disclosed by Chinese authorities in less than a year, following major finds in Liaoning province in the northeast and Hunan province in central China.
Before these announcements, the world’s largest known gold deposits typically held only a few hundred tonnes. The industry had estimated that only about 3,000 tonnes of gold remained unmined in China, just a quarter of the remaining untapped gold in Russia and Australia.
The rapid succession of these new discoveries suggests China’s gold reserves could be much bigger than previously thought.
