Orpiment 石黄, also 雄黄, 熏黄, 黄金石, 天阳石, 黄石, 鸡冠石

Orpiment is an arsenic sulphide that is bright yellow to orange in colour. The name orpiment means “gold pigment” and indicates that an early use was as a pigment that imitated gold. In China, orpiment was widely used as a medical substance. In tropical regions, it also has an important use as a wood preservative that protects wooden buildings from insects.

Important orpiment mines existed to the south of Dali in modern Weishan county 巍山县. They appear in Ming-period records and may be older. Their product was one of the core goods in the long-distance trade network that linked the highlands to lowland Southeast Asia. Specifically, orpiment was one of the main goods transported into Myanmar and northern Thailand. Thus the trade served daily life in the tropical lowlands, providing a crucial mineral to preserve wooden structures, as it served Chinese life in the Far Southwest through the import of raw cotton, permitting textile production and clothing in the late imperial Chinese fashion despite the fact that cotton could not be grown in the region (Ma Jianxiong and Ma Cunzhao).

This project does not study orpiment, but considers the orpiment mines in the regional context of central western Yunnan.