Wangu gold field in China’s Hunan Province reportedly contains around $80 million worth of reserves—which could make it the biggest gold deposit in the world.
China has reportedly found the world’s largest gold deposit within a mountain cave in Pingjiang County, Hunan province, shares Ewan Palmer of Newsweek. Though multiple news sources have been unable to verify this announcement, it comes from the representatives of the Geological Bureau of Hunan Province (GBHP), told to Xinhua News with accompanying pictures of drilled rock samples and workers at the Wangu gold field in Pingjiang County on November 20, 2024 (where the deposit was found).
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A Valuable Find
These representatives estimate that the cave contains 600 billion yuan ($80 million) worth of reserves, with roughly 1,100 tons of gold around 3,000 meters below the Wangu gold field. If the information is true, this means that the cave could be the largest reservoir of valuable metal left on earth, as Harry Baker explains in a feature for LiveScience.
“Many drilled rock cores showed visible gold,” shares Chen Rulin, an ore-prospecting expert at the bureau, with Xinhua News.
This impressive find is not completely hard to believe, as China has long been a mining hub and one of the largest producers of gold in the world, according to a 2015 study by Rui Zhang et al. The demand for precious metals has also increased globally over the past few years due to their use in technology, as Vishwam Sankaran details in an Independent feature on the discovery—and China has been supplying a tenth of the world’s gold as of 2023.
More Gold?
Gold is a finite resource, which is what makes it such a valuable asset. Mike McRae of ScienceAlert explains that it takes hundreds of years for these precious metals to form, and experts are unsure if society has already discovered and mined the “peak” of this global supply. Yet the discovery in the Wangu gold field hints that there may be much more left in the earth than we know of.
Before this recent discovery, the South Deep gold mine in Gauteng Province, South Africa, had held the record for world’s largest reserve, with around 1,000 tons (930 metric tons) of gold according to Mining Technology.
Photo by Mario La Pergola via Unsplash.
