Yongsheng River Gold

Yongsheng River Gold

　　The Jinsha River flows through Yongsheng County for 215 kilometers, passing through 8 townships and 180 villages. Due to the abundance of alluvial gold in the Jinsha River, Yongsheng has become one of the main counties producing river gold in Yunnan. Historical records indicate that Yongsheng (formerly known as Yongbei Prefecture) began gold panning and smelting as early as before the Yuan Dynasty, boasting a history of over 500 years. By the Ming Dynasty, the imperial court began levying gold taxes on Yongbei Prefecture. During the Qing Dynasty, as the tax burden grew heavier, the government, citing “the inability to impose taxes without legitimate reason,” shifted the levy onto gold panners and farmers along the riverbanks. This led to the decline of the gold panning industry, leaving riverside farmers “selling their wives and children, suffering endless hardship.” In the sixth year of the Qianlong reign (1741), Liu Zhuo, a Yongsheng native serving as an official in the Hanlin Academy of the Qing court, risked his life to present the emperor with a petition titled “Request to Exempt the Gold Tax.” The imperial court then ordered the Viceroy of Yunnan to investigate in Yongbei Prefecture, resulting in the halving of the official gold tax. Only then did the gold panning industry in Yongsheng begin to recover.

　　The production of river gold in Yongsheng spans a vast area — from Heimianzi in Songping at the river’s entry point to Xin Tianxia in Renhe at its exit. Along the 215-kilometer stretch of the Jinsha River within Yongsheng, manual gold panning can be found almost everywhere. According to the 1939 report “Overview of the Geology and Gold Deposits Near Jinping Street, Yongsheng, Yunnan” by the Central Geological Bureau of the Republic of China, the number of gold panners alone in the Jinping Street area of Yongsheng reached 3,000, producing approximately 1,000 taels of gold per year. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, both the Yunnan Geological Research Institute and the People’s Liberation Army Gold Corps conducted specialized surveys of the river gold deposits along the Jinsha River in Yongsheng. These studies concluded that the 30-kilometer stretch of the river around Jinping had the highest-grade alluvial gold, with abundant gold content in the gravel strata on both banks. The areas along both sides of the Jinsha River in Yongsheng County hold rich alluvial gold mineral resources.

　　In recent years, the gold panning industry in Yongsheng has developed rapidly. The abundant river gold in Yongsheng has attracted people from Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Hunan, and other regions to engage in mining. The traditional method of manual gold panning using rocker boxes has been upgraded to motorized gold dredgers. During the dry season each year, nearly 100 gold mining boats often moor along the Jinsha River near Jinping Street in Yongsheng, presenting a bustling scene of “a hundred boats competing for gold.”