安徽省

Anhui Province straddles the lower Yangtze River in eastern China, a setting that places it on one of the country's great metallogenic belts. Its mineral wealth is dominated by copper and iron deposits formed where Mesozoic intrusions invaded the Yangtze's carbonate and sedimentary rocks.

The Tongling copper belt

The Tongling district — the 'ancient capital of copper' — is the best-known mining area in Anhui, a cluster of copper-gold skarn and porphyry deposits worked since antiquity. Its ores carry chalcopyrite, pyrite, magnetite and associated sulfides, together with skarn minerals and carbonates that provide collectable specimens.

Iron and the Yangtze deposits

Down-river around Ma'anshan and Fanchang lie major iron-ore districts of the same Yangtze metallogenic belt, contributing magnetite and hematite and rounding out a province defined by its copper-iron skarn geology.

For collectors

Anhui specimens are chiefly the sulfides and skarn minerals of the Tongling copper belt — bright chalcopyrite and pyrite with quartz and calcite — a grounded record of one of China's historic metal-producing regions.