Thok Jalung
mine in People's Republic of China
Thok Jalung was a goldfield in Tibet that gained international attention upon its discovery by the west.
Thok Jalung was one of many goldfields that stretched from Lhasa into western Tibet, north of the Tsangpo River watershed. Situated on the Changtang, 16,330 feet (4,980 m) above sea level, Thok Jalung was the highest altitude goldfield in the world and at the time was believed to be the highest altitude in the world inhabited all year round.
Thok Jalung was first visited by a non-Tibetan on 26 August 1867 when the pundit Nain Singh Rawat, who was secretly surveying Tibet, visited the mines. He would later say that Thok Jalung was the coldest place he had ever visited. It was not until 1906 that the first European visited Thok Jalung.
Thok Jalung was very productive and Nain Singh reported seeing one nugget weighing nearly 2 pounds (0.91 kg). The goldfield was about 1 mile (1.6 km) long, with a small stream running through the field, used to wash the gold out of the soil.
Miners lived in yak-hair tents pitched in holes two or more metres below the ground. There were about 300 miners during the summer and over 6,000 during winter, as frozen ground was less likely to collapse.
“Thok Jalung” enters the record as mine in People's Republic of China. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Thok, Jalung and mine can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q65042829. Authority coordinates are 32.240, 81.370. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1867 and 1906.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thok Jalung” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.