Myanmar or Burma is more or less the only substantial source of good quality jade within the white to green color spectrum worldwide.
Jade comes in two variants, jadeite and nephrite. Jadeite jade is considered superior jade because of its clarity. Jade is mainly mined in Myanmar or Burma at Mogaung and other sites in Kachin state, the most valuable jade is imperial jade.
Today most jade jewelry comes with jade mined in ” Jade County ” in upper Myanmar. Actually there is no Chinese jade, its Myanmar Jade exported legally or illegally to China.
Some jade jewelry items are jade bangle, jade beads, jade bracelet, jade Buddha, jade carving, jade earrings, jade gem, jade jewelry, jade necklace, jade pendant, jade ring, jade stone, jewels jade, lavender jade, oriental jade, pink jade, purple jade, red jade, yellow jade.
On this page you also find lots pictures of jade and something on jade wholesale.
The centre of the Myanmar – Myanmar jade industry is around Mogaung, near Myitkyina in upper Myanmar. A usual jade mine is series of small caverns where the excavation takes place.
The traditional method of ‘fishing’ for jade by paddling bare-footed in the stream was still followed here. It is one of the many picturesque fallacies with which the jade industry is beset, that the best pieces are always found, by touch, in this way.
In 2001, a giant jade stone was discovered in Ptiakant, the jade city of Kachin State. It was found at about 13 meter under ground and was covered by serpentine as being the dyke.
The jade stone has various colors including pale green, green, violet and others. Its crystal is with good composition.
The history of jade provides an interesting illustration of the creation by a refined and luxurious society of its symbol of wealth. The white
nephrite chosen possessed all the qualifications required. It was beautiful and rare; it could be obtained only with immense trouble.
Jade is known for about 7000 years. In prehistoric times it was valued for the hardness making it the material of choice for weapons and tools.
Already at about 3000 B.C. jade was a exclusive material in China also known as the Royal Gem. For the Chinese it had a similar value like gold and diamonds to the West.
Mayas, Aztecs and other “Americans” gave jade a higher value than gold. Also in ancient Egypt jade was a stone of love and other ideas.
The original Jade Mountain was at K’un Lun in South-East Turkestan and its fashioning into jewelry, owing to its extreme hardness, called for the expenditure of infinite labour and much technical skill. In the original quarries in Turkestan a certain small amount of green jadeite was also found.
By virtue of its rarity this green stone became practically priceless. With a kind of dim recognition of the influence of metallic oxides in establishing the jade’s color, many attempts were made to fake this valuable green by such ingenious methods as burying copper in contact with blocks of white nephrite.
With the adoption of jade symbols for the State worship of the Heaven, Earth and the ‘Four Quarters’, jade assumed for the Chinese the prestige associated with gold in the West; and it is safe to say that had one of the Biblical Three Wise Men of the East come from China, jade would have been his gift.
The discovery of jade by a thirteenth-century Chinese prospector, at a moment when the K’un Lun mines had reached exhaustion, of great quantities of jadeite in the Kachin States of Myanmar – Burma, caused a sensation in the Celestial Empire, and Mogaung became the El Dorado of many Chinese expeditions, the members of which mostly perished, after horrible privations of the type suffered by their Spanish counterparts in their search for gold.
Jade stone green raw pure football size gem emporium Yangon Rangoon Myanmar Burma.
Chinese jade carving Chinese figures from Myanmar Burma.
Finally the trade was established,
and it was found that, most happily, although jadeite of pure translucent green existed, it was rare, compared to the colors produced by the action of metallic oxides, other than copper, upon the silicate.
There was plenty of green jadeite at Mogaung, but most of it was the wrong green, or it was too opaque, or was variable in color, and thus succeeded in one way or another in defeating the demands of finicky connoisseurship.
The undermining of Chinese values was averted. Otherwise, one suspects, it would have been necessary to combat the threatened devaluation in some way, perhaps by the disappearance, for reasons of State, of all those concerned in the mine’s discovery.As things were, Chinese economy remained unshaken. Some sort of a jade-rush took place.
Jade raw deep green fist size
Laden caravans set out for China, and were regularly ambushed and looted by jade-thirsty freebooters, although the majority got through safely, to swell what was believed to be the wealth of the nation. Remembering that in their war with Burma, the Chinese forces made a bee-line for Mogaung, which they occupied, it may be surmised that the ends in view by those who provoked the conflict were less pure than those of justice. Prices were kept inflated and production restricted by the fact that all the jade mines were located in the Kachin tribal area. The Kachins insisted on working the mines in their own way,
steadfastly declining all offers involving leases or contracts. In their search for the stone, the Kachin relied upon divination. Quarries were opened with elaborate sacrifices and feasting, and then only after the omens had been consulted to decide whether or not the stone was to be allowed to ‘mature’, it being a Kachin opinion that the color improved with keeping. Even so the workings might be held up over some dispute about the sharing of the proceeds, a punctilious matter in, which every member of the clan, whether present or absent, was taken into consideration. Work was carried on only in March and April.
After that the jade mines became flooded by the rains, and took the rest of the year to dry out. Meanwhile the Chinese buyers sat by, twiddling their thumbs in impotent exasperation, unconscious of the fact that by great century good fortune the incompetence of the Kachin worked in their favor and cancelled out the disadvantage that Burma was nearer the cities of China than were the mines of South-East Turkistan. The last jade prices were much enhanced when King Mindon, an
Plenty of raw green jadeite jade from Mogaung
Jade small pieces of deep green color
enthusiastic monopolist, tried to set himself tip as middleman of the industry, and the Kachin retorted by discovering only inferior jade.
The Chinese have never been able to consider jade as mere ‘dead’ substance;
they have always had a rather modern view of the nature of matter. From the earliest times, it was associated with the five cardinal virtues: charity, modesty, courage, justice and wisdom (one notes in passing the omission from this category of the peculiarly Christian faith and hope). It was also quite inevitable that it should be believed that jade could be taken internally with beneficial results. Once a year, therefore, the Emperor fasted ceremonially, consuming nothing but powdered jade of the most exquisite color. This was for the good of the Empire; but, in the individual, thc liver as well as all the organs in mystical association with it, according to the Chinese medical philosophy, were benefited by homoeopathic doses.
The Chinese in their refined, almost tortured aestheticism, recognize 126 colors of jade, some of them baffling to Western amateurs, who find difficulty in differentiating between such shades as sky-blue and the blue of the sky ‘after it has been washed by a shower’. Nor can many Western experts claim, as do the Chinese, to distinguish one variety of jade from another by the touch.
It is said that before the British colonial times jade was so abundant that chunks of Myanmar Jade were used by Shan noble families as door-stoppers.
With full luster and good translucency,
jade can be very valuable. Jade is heavier, harder and brighter than other stones of the same size. When its crystal composition is smooth and delicate, the stone is accepted as a quality jade. Purple blue or hyacinth blue are also of reasonable value. At the biannual Myanmar Emporium plenty of jade are up for sale. For instance, slabs of jade of various colors and sizes.
Rough jade blocks ranged from a small 2 kg rock of a remarkable deep green prized Imperial jade valued at a staggering US$300,000 to a two-tonne boulder of light green jade lined with dark green veins at a reserve price of US$180,000.
The color of jade ranges from white to black including yellow, red, blue, green, etc. depending on its composite chemicals.
Jade Bangles from Myanmar with Most Exquisite Color
Colors of jade, jade elephants in pink, light green and brown from Myanmar Burma
Jade carving, crystal composition is smooth and delicate, warrior on horse Myanmar Burma
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