The price of precious metals may be going through the roof on the commodities markets, but the 6,000 Olympic medals officially handed over to Beijing yesterday will remain forever priceless to the athletes who win them next month.
Gold, silver, bronze, copper and jade have been scoured from mines around the world and then moulded and minted into the ultimate accolade to human sporting endeavour.
The nation's athletes hope to grab much more than a handful of the 2,000 gold medals, each plated with at least 6 grams of the precious metal. But for the next month at least, under tight security at a secret vault in the city, the host nation will be in possession of them all.
Organising committee executive vice-president Jiang Xiaoyu said at a ceremony in the capital: 'This is a victorious moment.'
The medals were minted in Shanghai from 13.04kg of gold dug by Australian mining giant BHP Billiton at its mine in Escondida, Chile.
The main metal in the gold medals is silver from BHP Billiton's Cannington mine in Queensland state. The silver was smelted on the mainland and then gold-plated.
'We've sweated over them,' said Dai Jin, who supervised the silver and bronze smelting at the Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group plant in Anhui province .