Chinese Gold Bar Photos – Lost in Translation

The above refineries of Zhongyuan, Zijin, Shandong Gold, and Shandong Zhaojin are on this LBMA Good Delivery list.  With 4 accredited refineries on the LBMA list, one might think that photos  / images of the gold bars of these refineries are easy to find. Next step is to see if any images of these refiners’ gold bars are available “on the web”. The short answer is that a few images are available, but they seem to be very rare and not saved very widely.

This is a ZIJIN ‘double cresent’ bar. Notice the SGE marking. Again, the image is taken from page 10 of the same GoldBars Worldwide brochure here, as it only seemed to be found there. The photographs in this brochure were actually supplied to Grendon by the refineries. ps: Page 6 of this brochure has a list of Chinese gold refineries which was sourced from the 2013 SGE annual report (Chinese version).

Note: if you look in the pdf in the link, the GoldBars Worldwide brochure actually labels this bar image as a Henan Zhongyuan bar which looks wrong. But the double crescent shows that it’s actually a ZIJIN bar, as per another Zijin bar on page 9 of the same brochure.

LBMA bar mark description - “Current Bar Mark:Triangle with two interlocking half circles and ZHAOJIN in Chinese characters within the triangle.”

The only images I could find of Shandong Zhaojin bar were these ones, from the Shandong Zhaojin Import and Export Co Ltd website:

Notice the SGE markings. Notice also the Shandong Zhaojin bar logo is the same as the Shandong Zhaojin company logo:

Does Shandong Zhaojin Import and Export Co Ltd export gold? On its website, its claims to export gold, although I find this surprising due to China’s strict gold export rules. Perhaps they mean gold exports as part of the processing trade gold exports.

In conclusion, the above search exercise led to the conclusion that Chinese gold bar photos are very hard to find…at least on English-speaking internet sites.

The ‘Motherlode’ Approach

The very limited search results above suggested a different approach was needed. Like a lot of people, I’d heard about the Google Chinese site http://www.google.cn, and its re-consolidation to operate from http://www.google.com.hk a few years ago. I had also vaguely heard of Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine, but had never had the need to use it.

I consulted with Koos Jansen here at BullionStar.  Koos advised the following approach: “Get the Chinese names of the refineries, and search Baidu”. Seems pretty obvious in hindsight…

For non-Chinese speakers, like myself, there are 2 ways to establish the Chinese names of the refineries. The first is to use a refinery’s website. This works most conveniently with dual-language websites, and it goes without saying that it only works if the Chinese refinery (or mining company) actually has a website, which isn’t always the case. The second approach is to use a Shanghai Gold Exchange list of SGE members names in English alongside the names in Chinese characters. Such a list can be seen here.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the results of using this approach in Baidu are astounding, compared to using Google.com. There are huge amounts of gold bar image results for the refiners. Here’s a flavor:

To retrieve images for the Shandong Gold Mining Company bars with the “Taishan” design, you need to search for

Shangdong Gold Mining Company “山东黄金矿业股份有限”

Gold Bar 金條

Taishan 新寧

Search Baidu for  “山东黄金矿业股份有限”  金條  新寧

This image is sourced from Chinese gold site http://ccne.mofcom.gov.cn, which is a Ministry of Commerce site called ‘China Commodities’ which looks like a reseller site, which contains various listings of different gold bars such as this list.

LBMA bar mark description -“Triangle with two interlocking half circles and ZHAOJIN in Chinese characters within the triangle.”

Searches for Zhongyuan Gold (China National Gold), Zijin Mining, Shandong Gold and Shandong Zhaojin using  Google Hong Kong  (English version) bring back very limited bar image results, mostly images from Gold Bars Worldwide brochures.

The Chinese equivalent name searches in Google Hong Kong (Chinese language) being back reasonable gold bar image results for each of the 4 refiners, but not nearly as many as for Baidu. For example, Google HK Chinese version, finds the below Zhaojin image in a directory called http://www.zhaojin.cn/imageRepository, which Google.com draws a blank on.

However, based on this quick overview, it would appear that Baidu provides the most comprehensive results for gold bar images of Chinese gold refiners.

With China an increasingly critical part of the world gold market, its gold bar brands (and photos of said bars) still do not appear to have registered more than a ripple outside of China. On the surface this is odd, but it makes sense given that a) China doesn’t generally allow gold bars to be exported so few outside of China ever see a Chinese gold bar, and b) the structure of the international search engine market i.e. China (Baidu) vs non-China (Google). Mote importantly, non-Chinese readers with the frequent or infrequent need to throw an image of a Chinese gold bar into their blog posts or tweets now have no excuse to keep recycling the same old images that are picked up in Google.com search results. With Baidu image search, the world of Chinese gold bars opens considerably.