Police found £520million worth of gold hidden in a Chinese official's home during an anti-corruption raid, reports say.
Detectives also reportedly discovered an astonishing £30billion in suspected bribes in the bureaucrat's bank account, which would make him the richest man in China.
Zhang Qi, 58, has been sacked from his position as secretary of the Communist Party Committee in Haikou - a city of around nine million people in Hainan province.
Footage of police allegedly counting piles of gold bars in the official's home has gone viral on social media, although red-faced Chinese censors have banned the clip.
Qi is under investigation by China's corruption watchdog as part of President Xi Jinping's crackdown on graft, the Mail Online reports.
The President previously said more than a million officials and dozens of former senior bureaucrats had been jailed for corruption since he launched he campaign.
He warned the campaign would never end as corruption was the "gravest threat" the party faces.
China came 87th on Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2018.
By comparison, the UK ranked 11th, the US 22nd and Denmark 1st.
A Transparency International statement on China, from 2014, said: "Despite the fact that there has been a widespread information campaign to denounce corruption and teach integrity , there is a legitimate concern about how the Communist Party’s war on corruption is being waged.
"There is a lack of independence of the judiciary, a lack of clarity on what constitutes corruption, and a lack of transparency in the process of prosecuting wrongdoing."
The richest man in China is Ma Huateng, a Chinese business magnate who founded the technology firm Tencent.
He is worth over £30billion, according to Forbes.
