China's Central Bank Just Bought Gold for a Record 21st Month Straight
The People's Bank of China added 20 tonnes of gold to its reserves in July, its biggest single month since October 2023. That extended a streak that has now run for 21 consecutive months without a break, the longest since China started publishing this data in December 1999.
Twenty-one months is not a headline that fades in a week. It is a central bank telling you, one monthly filing at a time, what it thinks gold is for.
Here is what the PBoC actually did, the month it did the most buying of all, and what any of this has to do with a shop counter in Singapore.
What happened in July
The PBoC reported an addition of 20 tonnes of gold in July, according to the World Gold Council's China market update, published by Ray Jia on 14 August. That brought total holdings to 2,366 tonnes, about 8% of China's total foreign reserves, and it was the largest monthly purchase since October 2023.
It was also the 21st month in a row without a gap.
| PBoC gold reserves | Figure |
|---|---|
| Added in July 2026 | 20 tonnes |
| Total holdings, end of July | 2,366 tonnes |
| Share of total foreign reserves | 8% |
| Consecutive months of buying | 21 |
| Previous longest streak | None on record since data began in December 1999 |
Twenty-one months means the PBoC has bought gold in every single monthly filing since November 2024. Not most months. Every month.
The month that explains the whole streak
One month in that run says more than the other twenty put together.
Gold fell hard in June, dropping below US$4,000 an ounce for the first time since November 2025 as a stronger dollar and rate expectations pulled the metal down from January's record high. That was gold's worst stretch of the year.
The PBoC added 14.93 tonnes that same month, its biggest purchase since October 2023 at the time, and a roughly 50% jump from May's 9.95 tonnes. Then July topped even June, with the price only partly recovered.
That ordering matters. A buyer chasing momentum adds more when the price is rising and pulls back when it falls. The PBoC did the opposite: bigger purchases as the price fell, and the biggest of all as it started to steady. That is what a counter-cyclical buyer looks like, and it is a different animal from a trader watching a chart.
Some analysts think the officially reported number understates the real total, pointing to gold that moves through the London over-the-counter market and doesn't show up in China's monthly SAFE filings. That claim is disputed and hard to verify either way. It doesn't need to be true for the point to stand. Twenty-one straight months, as reported, is already the longest streak on record.
Gold is still a small slice of China's reserves
Twenty-one months of buying and gold is still only 8% of China's total foreign reserves, per the same World Gold Council data. Reporting citing the South China Morning Post has pointed to that figure as the reason analysts expect the buying to continue rather than taper off: 8% leaves a lot of room next to reserve-holding central banks that sit closer to a quarter of their reserves in gold.
A small share is not evidence the PBoC is nearly done. It is closer to the opposite.
It isn't only the central bank
The same World Gold Council update covers more than the PBoC, and the private-sector numbers point the same direction.
China's net gold imports hit 152 tonnes in June, the highest since March 2024. Over the first half of 2026 as a whole, the country imported 764 tonnes, up 138% year-on-year. Chinese gold ETFs added 5 tonnes in July after a rougher May and June, and that has continued into August, with inflows recorded on nearly every trading day so far this month.
Jewellery demand is the one part of the picture still weak, which lines up with what we have covered before: record prices pushed Singapore's own gold shops toward bars and lighter jewellery over the same stretch. China's buyers made the same trade at a national scale. Central bank reserves up, imports up, ETFs recovering, jewellery still soft.
China isn't buying alone
South Korea just joined the same trend from a very different starting point.
The Bank of Korea announced on 3 August that it would resume buying gold after a 13-year pause, aiming to raise gold's share of its reserves over the medium to long term. Gold currently makes up only about 1.1% of Korea's reserves. The bank cited geopolitical risk alongside easing price pressure as its reasoning, and it's buying through both domestic purchases and overseas gold ETFs.
One country restarting a paused programme is a data point. A run of central banks doing it in the same stretch, each for their own version of the same reason, starts to look like a pattern in how reserve managers are thinking about gold generally, not a single institution's call.
What this means if you are watching from a shop counter
None of this is a signal to buy or sell on any particular day, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
What 21 months of uninterrupted buying tells you is that the demand under the gold price isn't only retail traders reacting to the week's headlines. A central bank managing reserves for decades bought more, not less, the month gold got cheapest this year. That kind of buyer doesn't check the price before deciding whether to keep going.
We wrote about this same idea in more general terms when we covered last quarter's global central bank numbers: a fast clock made of daily headlines, and a slow clock made of institutions that don't much care what happened on a Tuesday. The PBoC's 21-month streak is the slow clock, in the most concrete form it has taken all year.
At JJ Gold, we don't tell customers whether now is the right time to buy, sell or trade in. That call depends on your own goals far more than it depends on what a central bank did last month. What we can give you is the day's rate and an honest weight and purity reading on anything you bring in, whether that's a hollow rope chain off our own shelves or something that's been in a drawer since before this streak started. Everything we sell is real 916 or 999 gold, never plated, and it can be taken home on Shop Now, Pay Later with $0 down and up to 12-month instalments through Atome, PayLater by Grab, or SPayLater by Shopee.
Twenty-one months without a gap, and the biggest purchase of the streak came the month the price was at its weakest. That is not a forecast. It is a record of what one of the world's largest reserve managers actually did, filing by filing, while everyone else was watching the daily chart.
Bring your own pieces in and we will weigh them in front of you at City Plaza #01-47 (810 Geylang Road, Singapore 409286) or Lucky Plaza #02-47 (304 Orchard Road, Singapore 238863). Call 8950 4377 for the day's rate, or browse the collection at jjgoldjewellery.com.