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China Strikes Gold

China Strikes Gold

China has just discovered the biggest ever gold deposit in the country’s history in a mine that could produce gold over the next 40 years.

Shandong Gold Group announced on Tuesday that the biggest ever gold deposit in China has been found. It contains an estimated 380 tons of gold, they said said in a news conference in Beijing.

The mine, Xiling gold seam, lies in the eastern part of China, and is said to be more than 2,000 meters long and 67 meter wide, according to local media. At full production, the mine is said to be able to produce gold for 40 years.

The mine was found in the Laizhou-Zhaoyuan region, in the northwestern part of the Jiaodong Peninsula, in eastern China’s Shandong region. The region is known to have the largest gold deposits in the country.

Being the world’s second-largest economy, the country had the fifth largest gold reserves in the world, following the United States, Germany, Italy, and France, but might soon be stepping up the list. The mine is estimated to as much as 20 percent of the country’s gold reserves, which currently stands at 1,843 tons.

China had kept its kept reserves a mystery between 2009 and 2015, but ended the mystery in July 2015, when it announced a 57 percent increase over those 6 years.

Last November, the country claimed to have found an even bigger gold deposit beneath the seabed of the East China Sea. At the time, the Chinese media reported that the deposit lied at a depth of 2,000 meters and was home to as much as 470.47 tons of gold.

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