(1) The next morning we drove west to the famous town of Shimen, the locality for all the superb realgar and orpiment crystals.(2) It is an alteration product of realgar , native arsenic, and, less commonly, arsenopyrite.(3) Other minerals associated with the orpiment crystals are white to colorless barite crystals, lemon-yellow crystalline masses of sulfur, and minor realgar .(4) Orpiment is a lesser mineral associated with realgar and lead sulfosalts in dolomite at Binnental, Valais, Switzerland.(5) The specimen was a classic Lengenbach assemblage: sugary white dolomite matrix, realgar , minor pyrite, and a massive metallic gray sulfosalt that had been labeled as ‘sartorite.’(6) Small amounts of realgar have been reported from a large number of European occurrences, generally related to relatively recent volcanism, limestone or dolomite quarries, or base- and precious-metal deposits.(7) A number of relatively minor yet interesting California realgar localities are given by Murdoch and Webb.(8) Even the arsenic mine at Shimen, Hunan Province, is still the source of minor amounts of good realgar , orpiment, and calcite.(9) Unfortunately, however, many orpiment localities also contain abundant to trace realgar , sometimes intimately intergrown with the orpiment, leading to overall specimen stability problems.(10) Orpiment and realgar are yellow and orange mineral species of arsenic sulphide, used in 16th-century Venetian painting particularly, but at various other times also.
