Carat132 tonnes of jewellery, 339 tonnes of bars: China picks a side
China Gold Association figures put first-half gold jewellery consumption at 132.13 tonnes, down 33.88%, against bar and coin demand of 339.34 tonnes, up 28.42%. Total consumption still rose 1.23% to 511.41 tonnes. The jewellery counter is now the smaller half by a distance.
§1More gold, far less jewellery.
China bought more gold in the first half of 2026 than in the first half of 2025 and bought far less jewellery. The China Gold Association's half-year figures put national gold consumption at 511.41 tonnes, up 1.23% year on year, with gold jewellery at 132.13 tonnes, down 33.88%, and bars and coins at 339.34 tonnes, up 28.42%. Investment metal is now two and a half times the jewellery figure in the world's largest jewellery market. The association attributes the split to elevated and volatile prices and to the rollout of new domestic gold tax policies, with temporary price corrections pulling buyers into bank-sold bars.
That is a second authority on the same market, and it does not agree with the first. This paper reported on 3 August, from the World Gold Council's Q2 report, that Chinese jewellery demand fell about 30% across the half to roughly 136 tonnes and hit its weakest second quarter since 2004. The China Gold Association now puts the same half at 132.13 tonnes and the same decline at 33.88%. The gap is about four tonnes and nearly four percentage points, on definitions that differ between a consumption series and a demand series. Both bodies describe the same collapse and neither should be quoted to the decimal against the other.
§2Two authorities, four tonnes apart.
The bar and coin line is where the number changes what a retailer should do. A Chinese consumer who once bought a chain as a store of value now buys the bar directly, and 339.34 tonnes says that substitution has already happened at scale rather than being a forecast. The jewellery counter is not losing customers to another jeweller; it is losing them to a product with no making charge, no design risk and a resale spread the buyer can calculate. That is the same structure this desk described on 5 August in Luk Fook's fixed-price mix, where the profitable answer was to sell design rather than grams.
Investment metal is now two and a half times the jewellery figure in the world's largest jewellery market.
§3Why the value line hides it.
The value line will keep hiding this. At the prices that have run all year, 132 tonnes of jewellery is worth more in yuan than a much larger tonnage was worth in 2024, which means Chinese jewellery revenue can be reported as healthy while the metal moving across the counter falls by a third. This paper has made the same point about India, where 75.1 tonnes in the second quarter was a 15% volume fall and roughly a 50% value rise. Any 2026 comparison built on revenue rather than weight is measuring the gold price and calling it demand.
The tonnage series says the Chinese jewellery counter has lost a third of its volume in a year and the total consumption figure says the country's appetite for gold is intact, which are not contradictory statements but one statement about form.
Gold is winning and jewellery is losing, in the same market, at the same time. For a fabricator planning Chinese orders into the fourth quarter the useful figure is 132.13 tonnes and not 511.41, and the useful question is whether a piece justifies its making charge against a bar sitting in the same window. Two authorities now put the decline between 30% and 34%, which is close enough to plan against and far enough apart to quote carefully.
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