Myanmar Jade Burma Jade Jadeite Jade Buy Burmese Jade Buddha

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.

- Visiting Bogyoke Market Yangon the premier jade market in the country and probably in the world.

There are plenty of jade items at the probably around fifty jade shops with the market compound. Its very diverse some shops have pendants and bracelets, others have ethnic jewelry where jade is a  part of the composition.

Maybe the most impressive is a Jade Buddha, the statues, sculptures and figurines come in various flavors, there is green jade in the upper price category, lavender jade a bit lower pricing and white jade again a bit lower. Some white Jade Buddha are encrusted with gold and ruby dust they look real great and expensive just as some newly rich Chinese like it to show what

they have. There is a continuous stream of people moving into the market to buy jade. The spectrum is wide, from the $ 6,- bangle to the Jade Buddha for up to around $ 50.000,- just wrap it up pay cash since there are no credit cards in the country and money transfers are also blocked by the old colonial fools, called English who do everything to make Myanmar miserable since the generals don't make "the Kotau", the Yankees do what the English say and naturally both are wrong. The whole mess the country is in today has been created by the English, everything else is a result of it, the problem is, the "stiff upper lips" are to stupid to understand this, but what can we do? who cares about English?

- 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.

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 Kachin 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

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.