Image of Ao, a giant turtle in Chinese mythology, outside Zhaoyuan, China’s official city of gold, located in Shandong province.

China is the leader in extracting gold, zinc, lead, molybdenum, coal, tin, tungsten, rare earths, graphite, vanadium, antimony and phosphate, and holds second place in mine production of copper, silver, cobalt, bauxite and manganese.

At the same time the country is the number one consumer of metals and minerals – in iron ore its imports constitute nearly 80% of use and in copper it’s approaching 50% and for nickel it’s already above that.