It took the Caishikou department store just hours last month to run out of gold bars stamped with a Year of the Rooster motif, so Beijing's top gold retailer asked customers to register by phone for a second round. Nearly 3,000 did, salesmen said. In China, gold is back in vogue. The country's growing urban middle class is lining up to cash in on a spectacular 30 percent rally in the precious metal's value over the last two years to a 16-year peak on December 2.
The rise is partly because the US dollar, long China's hard currency of choice, has dived nearly 30 percent over the same period.
Chinese investors have about 225 million yuan ($27.2 million) saved in gold, state media say. That's a drop in the ocean compared with total savings of $1.3 trillion, but a sea change from when gold hoarding was forbidden after the Communists took power in 1949.
Exporting gold is still banned, but a thriving home-grown market now allows the metal to trade relatively freely.
In line with late leader Deng Xiaoping's recognition that "to get rich is glorious", the Shanghai Gold Exchange opened for business in 2002, reviving memories of the city's status as a gold trading hub in the 1930s.
Some 235.35 tonnes of gold changed hands on the exchange in 2003, and 170.04 tonnes in the first half of this year alone.
The Bank of China -- the nation's premier foreign exchange lender -- jumped into the fray a year ago, offering "paper gold" certificates to Shanghainese. Account holders use the certificates to buy and sell gold held by the bank.
On Friday, the bank -- which has handled about 2.3 million grammes of paper gold transactions so far -- announced it would expand the programme to the rest of China.
"Shanghai is relatively rich so we launched here," said a paper gold specialist with the Beijing-based bank.
"When it first started, we got a lot of interest from people in Shanghai and other cities, calling to see how they could buy," she said. "The city's investors are fairly savvy. They see very quickly how they can make money with this."
Analysts see China's consumption of gold growing at most 6 percent annually in the next year or so, but growth would be in double digits by the end of the decade.
Consumption is still about a tenth that of the United States. Per capita gold consumption is 0.16 grammes in China, against 2.70 grammes in Hong Kong and 1.42 grammes in the United States, said Jon Bergtheil, global metal strategist for J.P. Morgan.
But as incomes rise alongside red-hot economic growth rates in excess of 8 percent, China could tighten the global supply-demand balance.
"We consider gold to be a delayed market in China on two counts: one, the late liberalisation of the market; and two, if you look at any economy, it is only with surplus cash that the average consumer consumes jewellery," Bergtheil told Reuters.
Steadily rising demand, coupled with flat production and stable patterns of central bank sales, could support global gold prices in upcoming years, analysts said.
J.P. Morgan's projections showed mine production had peaked, with the only area of potential growth -- South Africa -- held back by the strong rand, Bergtheil said.
Assuming individual investment absorbs 400 tonnes a year of gold, Bergtheil forecast that prices would average $435 an ounce in 2005, rising to $450 in 2006 and 2007.
His model assumes central banks will not dump gold reserves, but that they will sell some if prices reach $550 an ounce.
Spot gold traded at around $438 an ounce on Friday morning, off a December 2 high of $456.75. At the beginning of 2003, it was quoted at around $350 an ounce.
But for China to make its mark on global gold markets, more of its 1.3 billion people need to acquire a taste for the metal.
Most Chinese consumers still buy gold primarily for jewellery, not investment.
Rural women and low-wage city workers often buy gold earrings and bracelets, favouring a high level of purity to ensure easy re-sale. But wealthy urbanites prefer platinum, in part because of its higher price and greater status value.
"If high net-worth individuals decide to spread the risk in their currency portfolio, say to even 5 percent in gold, that's a lot of money entering a small market," J.P. Morgan's Bergtheil said.
Gung-ho investors in gold also dream of the rewards should China's central bank raise the percentage of gold in its reserves to the same ratio as the European Central Bank.
That would mean China could buy more than 4,500 tonnes, to add to the 600 tonnes now held, Bergtheil said.
"If you want to be a super-bull on gold, you assume that China decides gold is a viable alternative to the dollars it's storing up and which are increasingly being devalued," he said.
"Nobody wants to go along that argument route at the moment because the numbers are simply too staggering."
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