Going for Gold on the Tibetan Frontier
Gabriel Lafitte
In 2025, China is hungrier than ever for gold, as an abiding holder of accumulated wealth, in a time when even the biggest Chinese real estate builders, tech entrepreneurs, exam coaching, and other industries can go broke in a blink. The focus is on the copper, and on the hydro dams that power its extraction from remote Tibetan mountain sides, and the copper cables that transmit electricity from Tibetan rivers to far distant Chinese industrial hubs. Yet, in Tibet, these deposits are consistently polymetallic, usually bearing not only copper but also extractable and profitable molybdenum, silver, and gold. The quantum of gold may be small, but not its value.
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