Quartz

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Mineral guide

Learn about Quartz

a versatile mineral with clear, milky, and colored varieties; crystal forms, formation clues, and tips for identifying amethyst and citrine.

Regional guide

Quartz from Yaogangxian Mine, China

from the Yaogangxian Mine is rarely collected as an isolated species in the way one might pursue Alpine gwindels or Arkansas plates. Its power is as the luminous architecture of a complex tungsten-tin hydrothermal system: glassy points spearing through metallic bournonite, milky to water-clear groups carrying purple fluorite cubes, quartz prisms dusted with pyrite or arsenopyrite, and sharp crystals acting as the pale stage on which scheelite, muscovite, dolomite, calcite, stibnite, stannite, rhodochrosite, and chlorite play out one of China’s great specimen assemblages.