Huize Dekang Mint Bureau

Step into the quiet courtyards of the Huize Wu Temple at No. 126 Xi Nei Street. Built during the Qing Dynasty, this municipal-level heritage site shelters the Huize Dekang Mint Bureau behind its cyan brick walls and grey tiled roofs. The air carries the faint, metallic scent of copper, a reminder of the era when Huize supplied most of the empire's coinage.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, this mountain town produced over seventy percent of Yunnan's copper. The original Dongchuan Prefecture Old Mint Bureau fell to ruin long ago, but on August 2, 2021, the Dekang Mint Bureau opened here to revive the ancient metallurgical arts. Inside, visitors encounter raw copper ore, heavy smelting bellows, casting sand, and historic molds.

The human hand is present in every corner. Master craftsman Kang Guaiyou, a provincial inheritor of the national-level mottled copper technique, leads this revival. His family has passed down these secrets for four generations. To create a single piece of mottled copper, artisans select natural raw copper with a purity exceeding ninety percent. They hammer the cold metal, fire it, and polish it through twenty distinct stages over three months. This labor coaxes out brilliant, irregular flashes of gold, deep blue, and scarlet from the metal.

One of the bureau's treasures is a floating incense burner. Kang Guaiyou spent ten months hammering a thirty-six-point-five-kilogram block of raw copper down to a delicate one-point-six-kilogram vessel. It floats in water, perfectly balanced on three feet. Nearby, a replica of the giant Jiajing Tongbao coin reminds visitors of the scale of ancient minting. The original sixteenth-century coin weighs over forty-one kilograms and measures fifty-eight centimeters across.

Today, the rhythmic clang of hand-hammering echoes through the timber-frame halls. Visitors can touch the coarse casting sand, feel the weight of the engraving tools, and watch the transformation of raw ore into currency. The bureau preserves a living connection to the miners and minters who once fueled the economy of an empire.