Golden moment in nanotechnology

Over the past two decades, China has become the world's leading gold market. Gold in China currently accounts for about 35% of overall global supply and demand, and for 28% of the world's jewellery. As both the largest consumer and producer of gold in the world, China plays a key role in perpetuating and protecting gold's future on the planet. Remarkably, that echoes the country's first interactions with the substance: in the realm of medicine.

Indians and Egyptians used gold-based medicinal preparations, but China seems to have been the earliest to cure sickness with it, dating as far back as 2500 BCE. Since the discovery of gold, people thought it had an immortal nature, given its resistance to chemical corrosion, and associated it with longevity. In Huan Kuan's On Salt and Iron (81 BCE), it's stated that "immortals swallow gold and pearls, so that they enjoy eternal life in heaven and on earth".

Indeed, gold became the Eastern Jin Dynasty's (317–420 CE) "superfood". In scholar Ge Hong's Baopuzi: Gold Elixir, he wrote that to eat gold "tempers the body of a human being, and he enjoys eternal life". Alchemist and writer Wei Boyang of the Eastern Han Dynasty (22–220 CE) wrote in Zhouyi Cangtong Qi: "Gold is the most valuable thing in all the world because it is immortal and never gets rotten. Alchemists eat it and they enjoy longevity."