Chow Sang Sang gold reads 1,245 yuan, 11.6% off 25 August
Three Chinese brand counters read between 1,242 and 1,246 yuan a gram on 29 September, each down 163 to 165 yuan since late August. Spot gold has since risen to $4,191.60.
By Carat Capital
What changed
The counters gave back the summer. Three Chinese brand gold counters read 1,242 to 1,246 yuan a gram on 29 September. Each is down 163 to 165 yuan from its 25 August high.
What it means
- If you buy gold jewellery in China: The counter sits more than 11% below its August peak, a week before the holiday.
- If you price against a counter: These are retail boards carrying workmanship and margin, not spot.
- What this is not: A current price. Spot has since risen; no 30 September board was reached.
Key figures
| Chow Sang Sang, yuan a gram29 September, down 27 in a session | 1,245 |
|---|---|
| Yuan off the 25 August high1,408 to 1,245, a fall of 11.6% | −163 |
| Lao Miao, lowest of the three | 1,242 |
| Spot gold, the morning tapeKitco bid, 04:58 UTC | $4,191.60 |
Source: Sina Finance carrying National Business Daily, 29 September 2026 13:56 CST · page read direct, 32,648 bytes · spot from the Carat Capital tape, 30 September 04:58 UTC
One session, then one month
Twenty-seven yuan overnight. Chow Sang Sang's pure-gold counter read 1,245 yuan a gram on 29 September, down 27 yuan on the session. Lao Miao read 1,242, down 33.
The month is larger. Against the near-three-month high of 25 August, the three counters are down 163 to 165 yuan. That is 11.6% to 11.7% below the high, on Carat Capital's division.
Two readings agree. Carat Capital published the 25 August board on 27 August: 1,408, 1,410 and 1,407 for the same three brands. The source's base figures match all three to the yuan.
| Counter | 25 August | 29 September | Fall | Below the high |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chow Sang Sang | 1,408 | 1,245 | −163 | 11.6% |
| Chow Tai Fook | 1,410 | 1,246 | −164 | 11.6% |
| Lao Miao | 1,407 | 1,242 | −165 | 11.7% |
Notes on this table
Levels and falls are the source's. The last column is Carat Capital's division: 163 over 1,408 is 11.6%, so 1,245 is 88.4% of the high and 11.6% below it; 164 over 1,410 is 11.6%; 165 over 1,407 is 11.7%. The source states only that all three exceed 11%. The 25 August levels match, to the yuan, the board Carat Capital published on 27 August from a separate reading.
Retail buyers came in
Footfall rose, not fell. Merchants in Shenzhen's Shuibei market told Jiemian News that traffic picked up and restocking ran faster than in August. One trader put sales up 20% to 30% on the month.
The holiday explains some. The report ties the pickup to the lower price and to weddings clustered around the 1 October holiday.
Spot has already turned
The metal moved back. Sina put spot gold at $4,136.73 an ounce at publication on 29 September. The tape read $4,191.60 at 04:58 UTC on 30 September, $54.87 higher.
Counters lag the metal. Brand boards price finished jewellery and carry workmanship and margin above the metal. A move in spot reaches them on the brand's own schedule.
What to watch
- 1–8 OctoberChina's National Day holiday, the strongest retail week of the autumn for gold counters.
- The next counter boardWhether the three brands follow spot back up or hold the lower level.
- Each morningThe price tape, which carries one spot mark a session.
The story so far
Go deeper
What would change this call
A second independent reading of the 29 September board. One outlet carries it, and its two named levels were checked against the internal arithmetic the piece itself supplies, not against a rival source. The 25 August base is independently confirmed by this paper's own reading of a month ago, which is the stronger leg of the check; the 29 September session has one leg only. A rival board showing different closes for either brand would move the percentage column.
What a Chinese counter board actually prices
A Western reader meeting these numbers usually asks why a gram of gold costs 1,245 yuan when the metal, converted, costs a good deal less. The answer is that a brand counter board is not a metal quotation at all. It is the shelf price of finished pure-gold jewellery, which is to say the metal plus a per-gram workmanship charge, plus the brand's margin, plus whatever the shop is carrying in inventory cost from the week it bought the bar. The workmanship charge is the part that varies most between brands and the part the board does not disclose, which is why a board can be read for direction and for the spread between brands but never decomposed into a metal price. The direction is still worth having. When ten brands price within seven yuan of each other, as they did in late August, nobody believes they have room to hold a level the metal has left, and the board becomes a fast and public reading of what Chinese consumers are actually being asked to pay. That is also why the board lags: a brand that reprices every morning is telling you about the metal, and a brand that reprices when its inventory turns is telling you about its own book.
Method
The item was read from Sina Finance, carrying National Business Daily, fetched direct with a browser user agent, 200, 32,648 bytes to a saved file, with all prose taken from those raw bytes. Grepped in that saved file before anything was written: '1245' returns 7 hits. The source's own sentence gives Chow Sang Sang at 1,245 yuan a gram, down 27 overnight, and Lao Miao at 1,242, down 33; a second sentence gives the 25 August high for all three brands as 1,408, 1,410 and 1,407, the cumulative falls as 163, 164 and 165, and states that all three exceed 11%. The percentage column here is Carat Capital's own division of those figures and matches the source's claim. The 25 August levels were independently confirmed against this paper's own 27 August reading of the same three brands, which gives the identical three figures; that cross-check is the reason the base is treated as firm and the single-session figure is not. The Shenzhen merchant material reaches this desk at two removes, Sina citing Jiemian News citing unnamed traders, and is therefore paraphrased with that chain stated rather than quoted. The spot figure is not re-read here: under the One-Price Rule the tape's 05:00 mark stands when a metals story does not lead, and 4,191.60 is the figure newsroom/tape/2026-09-30.json and latest.json both carry, sourced to Kitco's bid at 04:58:57 UTC and confirmed against CNBC within rounding by the prices desk. The archive was checked by reading every hit rather than counting: 'Chow Sang Sang' returns eleven articles, all opened; the nearest are 27 August (the 25 August board), 23 August (a Shanghai three-counter piece) and 9 August (exchange against counter). Each covers a different session at different levels, so the verdict is new by period, not by digits.