8 facts on China’s golden infrastructure

It wouldn’t be surprising if we were all feeling a little let down by China this month. Those of us in gold investment look forward to the hype surrounding China’s increased gold buying activities ahead of the Lunar New Year, this year however the demand for gold has not been as high as we’ve come to expect.

Yet with news that China’s gold imports from Hong Kong increased by 94% in 2012, it is clear that their appetite for the ultimate safe-haven is still something which deserves both our attention and our admiration.

Whilst on one side of the globe you see the Germans struggling to get just 300 tonnes back from the United States, quite the opposite is happening with China where between 700 – 800 tonnes were imported from Hong Kong last year.

It is both historical and increasingly common knowledge that during times of financial crises we turn to safe-havens, such as gold. The Chinese have not let us down, with many speculating that the country is close to accumulating nearly 6,000 tonnes of gold.

Not only is China breaking records with its gold demand, it’s also breaking records with its vast infrastructure portfolio – the new Sky City will not only be the world’s tallest building but also the quickest to be built, taking only 3-months.

China has some of the most famous historical buildings in the world, as well as some of the most modern. Here we imagine what would happen if the Chinese decided to demonstrate both their wealth and ambition by combining the two together.

1. The Great Wall of China is, according to the last survey, 21,196 km long. If you were to lay the length of the wall in 12.5kg good delivery bars it would take 89 million bars to do so, at a cost of $720,000 per gold bar
   
2. If the floor of the Forbidden City was laid with gold it would require over 3 million gold bars at a cost of over £1 trillion.
   
3. The Shanghai World Financial Center is 492m high, if you stacked 12.5kg gold bars up, length to length you would need over 2084 bars to reach the top.
   
4. But that’s nothing compared to Sky City, which will be the world’s tallest building when completed at the end of March. To reach the top in gold, it will take nearly 3,551 12.5kilo bars. In contrast the Burj Khalifa which would need 16 bars less to reach the top.
   
5. The Beijing National Stadium, more fondly known as the Bird’s Nest, is made up of 110,000 tonnes of steel. If the Chinese had decided to go all out and build it out of gold they would have used 9,166,666 12.5kg bars.
   
6. When building the Bird’s Nest began one kilo of gold cost $10,000, by the time it finished in 2008 the gold price had reached $30,000. Had they replaced steel with gold the original cost would have been $1 trillion – rather a lot more than the actual build price of $423 million!
   
7. The precious and world-famous Terracotta Army was created to protect the first Emperor of China in the afterlife. 6,000 of the soldiers stand guard in ‘pit one’; if the Emperor had decided to guard himself with vast wealth, he would have needed 423,000 bars of gold. Had that been uncovered today the gold would be worth close to £195bn, no doubt holding the similar purchasing power today as it did back then.
   
8. The Yangtze River, the world’s third largest, runs for over 6,418 km, and some parts are known as the Golden Waterway. Within the region, 1,000 of China’s 2,500 Super wealthy individuals reside, with a personal wealth of more than 2 billion Yuan. Last year their wealth increased by 6.1% – strangely the same percentage increase seen by gold in the same period.
   

Jan Skoyles 

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