(TibetanReview.net, Jun08’26) – China has discovered a new source of high-purity quartz in Tingkye (Chinese: Dinggyê) county of Shigatse City, southern Tibet autonomous region, potentially reducing its reliance on imports of the critical material for making solar panels and semiconductors, reported the scmp.com Jun 8, citing a paper published in the European Journal of Mineralogy in April.
High-purity quartz is a gold standard manufacturing material for numerous hi-tech items, including some whose global market is dominated by China.
However, China has relied on imports to obtain the important material, with most coming from the United States, because of a lack of domestic sources for the rare quartz. The recent geological discoveries could help China rewrite that dependence, the report said.
“Our results demonstrate that these leucogranites (in Tibet) hold considerable potential to produce high-purity quartz with [silica] contents above 99.995 per cent,” the team from the University of Science and Technology of China and the China Geological Survey was stated to have written.
The finding “offers a significant opportunity to develop high-end quartz resources in China, ensuring a stable and strategic supply of high-purity quartz raw materials”, the authors were stated a saying.
Tibetan leucogranites are stated to be a type of granite largely composed of quartz, which is the second most abundant mineral in the Earth’s continental crust. However, high-purity quartz – which is at least 99.9 per cent pure silica – is stated to be much harder to find.
The report cited the Chinese team as saying global high-purity quartz resources are “scarce and highly unevenly distributed, leading to significant supply chain risks”.
The report said that with properties of heat and corrosion resistance, high insulation and low thermal expansion, this quartz is used as a foundational material for emerging industries and a raw material to produce polysilicon – a material that allows solar panels to turn sunlight into energy – as well as the quartz crucibles used in the production of electronics, optical components, solar panels and computer chips.
China is stated to be the world’s largest importer of high-purity quartz, with much of the world’s high-purity quartz supply coming from a mine in the US town of Spruce Pine in North Carolina.
In 2025, China’s natural resources ministry categorised high-purity quartz as the country’s 174th mineral for exploitation, after the first mineable source was found in Henan province in 2020 and another was found in the Xinjiang (East Turkestan) in 2021.
“The widely distributed leucogranites in the Tibet region … provide an ideal research target for achieving breakthroughs in high-purity quartz resources and ensuring national resource security,” the Chinese team was stated to have written.
Tingkye borders Nepal’s Sankhuwasabha and Taplejung Districts to the south and India’s Sikkim state to the southeast.