But reviewing last week's news that China's Gold Hoard Rose 75% in the five years to end-2008, CPM now thinks it important that the 454-tonne purchase were initially made by the non-central bank State Administration of Foreign Exchange (SAFE), and only recently transferred to the People's Bank of China (PBOC).

CPM analysts believe that the confirmation of the Chinese move to place the gold in its official reserves indicates the extent to which gold is being rehabilitated as a monetary reserve asset, not only by the Chinese monetary authorities but by central bankers around the world.

It suggests that monetary authorities are looking at gold as a monetary asset with greater interest than at any time since the 1960s.

If that's the case, then Europe's big central banks - currently the top hoarders outside the US, and pipping China to spots four, three and two in world gold reserves - don't get it. Not yet at least.

"That China has bought gold doesn't surprise me," says ECB policy-maker Nout Wellink to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung paper Tuesday. And given how Chinese FX reserves rose six-fold all told to $2 trillion over the same period, shrugging your shoulders seems fair enough. Because as a proportion of foreign reserves, gold barely budged for China to just 1.7%. France, Germany and Italy, by comparison, hold some 70% of their reserves in gold. So they've got it to sell, just as they did 10 years ago when signing the first Central Bank Gold Agreement.

Now China looks keen to buy (albeit at a much slower pace than it's acquiring dollars) Wellink calls the Chinese news "a positive development and I appreciate the move." He also says renewing the CBGA this September is a shoo-in. It's certainly "the path of least resistance" for the big European gold-hoarders, as Philip Klapwijk of the GFMS consultancy put it earlier this month.

But will China really need to go to Europe - or the IMF, as pundits agree of the G20's restatement of its pre-proposed 400-tonne sales - to grow its gold hoard? "China is currently the biggest gold producing nation in the world," notes Dr. Edel Tulley at Mitsui here in London. "[But] the fact that this sale amounted to a purchase of domestic metal [direct from local miners] matters little.

"It all feeds it less supply of metal on the market. And in very simple economics, this should feed into a higher Gold Price."

The purchase of 454 tonnes equaled more than one-third of China's reported gold mining output (1,230 tonnes) since end-2003. And whatever the politics of announcing this growth in gold reserves at the same time as demanding the end of the Dollar's No.1 Currency Status, that demand makes a sweetly mandated buyer for China's domestic miners.