The two largest gold deposits discovered in China may contain a collective mass of 2,000 metric tons (2,200 US tons) of the precious material – the largest found within the country’s borders.
If confirmed by further geological surveys, the Wangu deposit in Hunan province and the Dadongou deposit in Liaoning province could be worth billions, with the Wangu deposit alone estimated at more than 600 billion yuan (US$83 billion).
These estimates come with important caveats – some about not counting the gold eggs before the goose lays them – at least because the Wangu assessment assumes the entire resource can be extracted and current gold prices are maintained, conditions rarely achieved in real-world mining.
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Watch the video below for a summary:
China’s state news agency Xinhua reported the Wangu deposit in late 2024 as a ‘supergiant’ discovery with the potential to dramatically expand China’s gold resources.
“Several drilled rock cores have shown visible gold,” Bureau prospector Chen Rulin said at the time of the discovery.
The report states that the deposit contains 300 tons of gold reserves—that is, gold that has been evaluated and quantified—at a depth of 2,000 meters (1.2 miles), with more than 1,000 tons estimated at 3,000 meters.
No scientific paper or report has yet been published on the Wangu deposit, but an exploration report may still be prepared.
The Dadonggou deposit could be even more impressive.
According to China’s State Council Information Office, recent government briefings have suggested the potential resource could reach 1,500 tonnes – more than the 1,000 tonnes estimated in a report published in June. China Mining Magazine earlier this year.
The discovery was made by the Liaoning Fifth Geological Brigade, which surveyed the area and found that the gold section there, dismissed as economically unviable in the 1980s, is actually a large, continuous mineralized belt, about 3,000 meters long and 1,500 meters wide.
Each borehole contained gold drilled by prospectors, the paper states. It’s relatively low grade at 0.3 to 1 part per million — so the amount of gold per ton of material is fairly low — but researchers say it can be easily extracted, with a potential gold recovery rate of 65 to 91 percent.
Here may be the interesting part kind of of deposit repress by Dadongong.
It appears along the Tan-Lu Fault, a major tectonic boundary fault zone with large horizontal shear fractures, in which minerals such as gold and pyrite have accumulated over time.
The features are different from everything else in the area, suggesting that we may have overlooked a similar gold deposit because the geology did not look as expected for a significant gold deposit.
So, while it’s true that the Dadonggou deposit appears to contain large amounts of gold, its huge value could serve as a signpost to identify others like it—if grade hold and extraction prove as fruitful as early research predicts.
Gold, for all its wonderful uses, is not abundant in the upper layers of the earth. For every ton of crust material, there is only an estimated 0.004 grams of precious metals. Yet somehow, there are areas that have “bonanza” abundances.
In 2021, Canadian researchers proposed that rich gold deposits may be more common than we thought, and may have occurred in many other contexts than previous estimates allowed.
People have treasured gold for thousands of years, using it in unique tools, art, jewelry, and burials. Yet the precious heavy metal still surprises us with new discoveries.
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In 2024, Swedish researchers created golden, a single-atom-thick, two-dimensional type of gold, with properties not seen in its regular form.
Also last year, scientists in Australia proposed that earthquakes help create gold deposits deep underground, while in England, a metal detectorist discovered what could be the country’s largest nugget.
Researchers continue to develop potential medical uses for nanoparticles of this precious, limited resource: from fighting antimicrobial resistance to protecting vision and treating Parkinson’s symptoms.
One study even suggests that gold nanoparticles can improve the taste of our wine.
It is not yet clear how many bonanzas of precious ore remain to be discovered around the world. Evidence is beginning to suggest that we may have reached an all-time high for gold in 2018.
Until more data comes in, the recently reported scales remain tentative, with more detailed reports no doubt in the works.
Other large deposits, such as Kerr-Sulphrates-Mitchell in Canada, with an estimated 4,790 tonnes, and Pebble in the US, with an estimated 3,310 tonnes of gold, may still leave them in the dust.
We will have to wait and see.
Research on the Dadonggou deposit is published China Mining Magazine.
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