materialsJade玉

China worked jade before it worked bronze. The Neolithic nephrite sources were Ningshao in the Yangtze delta, worked by the Liangzhu culture between 3400 and 2250 BCE, and Liaoning and Inner Mongolia, worked by the Hongshan between 4700 and 2200 BCE; Dushan jade was being mined as early as 6000 BCE. White jade came as tribute from the Kingdom of Khotan down the southern Silk Road, and its status-value is described as exceeding that of gold or silver. Han royalty were buried in jade burial suits, plaques drilled at the corners and sewn together with wire, and the Book of Later Han sets out who got which thread: gold for emperors, silver for princes, princesses, dukes and marquises, copper for their children, silk for lesser aristocrats, and nobody else at all.

In Mesoamerica the Olmec, the Maya and their neighbours had a single source, the Motagua River valley in Guatemala, and jade stayed an elite good — carved into figurines, inscribed with glyphs, hung on a goddess as water. Burmese jadeite reached China in quantity only after about 1800, as fei cui, kingfisher jade, and became the Qing aristocracy's stone while scholars kept to white nephrite.

In Aotearoa New Zealand nephrite is pounamu, and its record is about ownership rather than trade. Pounamu is a taonga, a treasure, found only in the South Island — Te Wai Pounamu, the land of greenstone water. Taonga gain mana as they pass down the generations; pounamu is held to absorb the mana of its past owners, and the most prized pieces have known histories going back many generations and were given to seal agreements. In 1997 the Crown returned ownership of all naturally occurring pounamu to Ngai Tahu under the Ngai Tahu Claims Settlement. The same source notes the market reality beside it: "much of the carved 'greenstone' sold in souvenir shops is jade sourced overseas".

Islamic amulet writing puts jade alongside jasper as a material credited with protective and medicinal properties — victory in battle, protection from lightning, treatment of diseases of the internal organs — and reads jade set with carnelian as fertility and embryogenesis.

Myanmar is estimated to produce upwards of 70% of the world's high-quality jadeite, most of it from the Jade Tract in Lonkin Township, Kachin State, and most of it cut elsewhere. Mining there was a state enterprise from 1964 to 1981, after which the gemstone laws were changed in 1981, 1985 and 1995 to admit private operators. New Zealand's pounamu is at the other pole: the resource belongs to an iwi by law, and the souvenir stone next to it on the shelf usually does not come from the country it is sold in.