Rebuilt from primary sources

China shifted out of U.S. Treasuries and into gold

Gold panel

Sources

U.S. Treasury holdings — U.S. Department of the Treasury, Treasury International Capital (TIC) system, Major Foreign Holders of Treasury Securities: Table 5 (current) and historical series. Latest month published: May 2026 (TIC runs a ~2-month lag).
China's gold reserves — State Administration of Foreign Exchange / People's Bank of China, Official Reserve Assets (官方储备资产), monthly. Latest month published: June 2026.
Gold price — LBMA Gold Price PM, month-end fix, USD per troy ounce.

Treasury share = China, Mainland ÷ Grand Total from TIC Table 5, monthly. The denominator is all foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, so the line answers "how much of the foreign-held Treasury market is China's?" Custodial bias is inherent to TIC: securities China holds through custodians in Belgium, Luxembourg or the U.K. are credited to those countries.
Series breaks: TIC rebenchmarks each June against its annual survey. Where the file reports two June figures, the revised one is used. Because numerator and denominator are rebenchmarked together, the ratio absorbs the break cleanly.
Gold, 2015-06 onward — SAFE's reported figures, taken directly (weight in 万盎司, market value in 亿美元).
Gold, before 2015-06 — SAFE did not publish a monthly series. Weight is the level the PBoC had disclosed as of that month (394 t, then 500 t from Dec 2001, 600 t from Dec 2002, 1,054 t from Apr 2009); market value is that weight × the LBMA month-end price. These months are drawn as a dashed line. The PBoC almost certainly accumulated gold between disclosures — the steps are reporting events, not purchase events.
Method check: for all 126 months where SAFE publishes both weight and value, weight × LBMA month-end price reproduces the published value to a mean error of 0.03%, which is what validates the pre-2015 valuation method.

The source graphic labelled its peak "Jun-11, 29%". In the current TIC vintage the peak is 28.2% in July 2011 (June 2011 is 27.9%) — TIC revises history each year, so a chart built from an older vintage will land slightly differently. Its "Nov-25, 7.3%" and "$683 billion" reproduce exactly.
Its x-axis printed 2015 twice and its right-hand axis was not internally consistent, so nothing here is calibrated to that image — both series are rebuilt from the publishers' own files.