Gold STANDARD

The art of finessing this precious metal is back in the spotlight.

- GORDON NG

Indulge me with an experiment: take a quick look around you, wherever you are, and count off the number of metal objects you see. Feel free to stop when you've run out of fingers. Now repeat that with stone objects. The result, invariably, is that metal far outweighs stone. It's a fact of human progress: in prehistory, dating back millennia, periods are named after the metals copper, bronze and iron because they leapfrogged our collective development as a species so much.

There is, however, one noble metal that goes back furthest and which has endured longer than almost anything else when it comes to preciousness. Lustrously yellow and desirable, in stark contrast to the mucky brown earth that it's uncovered from, gold has been in archaeological finds as ancient as 6,500 years old as objects of adornment, rank and status. It is hoarded by national reserves, and used to be both the guarantee and basis of currency as we know it, hence the term 'gold standard'. And even today, the precious metal is traded as a commodity that, though it may shiver and fluctuate, never truly depreciates.

Though advances in technology have helped things along, the principles of working with gold remain roughly the same. Pure gold, too soft and malleable to be worn as jewellery, is mixed with other metals to obtain 18-carat alloys. It is then heated and hammered or chiselled into the desired shapes and forms. The work, in the past, was essentially muscle-powered. Modern tools make it less back-breaking, but it is at its core still a physical process.