10
Jade
The Stone of Heaven
A noble person’s virtue is like jade.
—Confucius
If there was one gem material that I never really expected to appreciate, let alone understand, that would be jade. Not a material prominent in our Western canon, it is missing from the ancient and medieval European lapidary texts, and only pops up in high jewelry at rather scattered and specific moments in modern history. For many of us in the West, jade is simply not on our radar.
Where it is understood, however, jade rules supreme. To the Chinese, it is part of their culture and in their blood. They have a saying: “Gold has a value, jade is invaluable.” It expresses a notion that is intuitive in some parts of the world, yet absolutely alien to others.
When the last Aztec emperor, Montezuma II, was negotiating with the Spanish invader Hernán Cortés in 1519, Montezuma conveyed a similar message. He presented Cortés with several jades, in his own words, “of such enormous value that I would not consent to give them to anyone save to such a powerful emperor [Charles I of Spain] as yours: each one of these stones is worth two loads of gold.”[1] The conquistadores initially wondered if they were emeralds. But they soon learned that these green and white pebbles were worth far more as they were the perfect bartering tool to build alliances—with other tribes tiring of Aztec rule—that helped pave the way to their eventual military victory. This gift symbolized how the value of jade outside its homelands has had to be learned and assimilated by outsiders.
In 1870 in New Zealand, where jade was already well established, but gold deposits had just been discovered (meaning a mining rush was on its way), the prominent local Maori leader Te Otatu emphasized this innately personal connection: “let the gold be worked by the white men. It was not a thing known to our ancestors. My only treasure is the jade.”[2]
In Chinese, Central American, and certain Pacific cultures, jade has been revered for thousands of years. Other highly valued gemstones have typically seen their cultural relevance spread far beyond the places where they were first found and admired—propelled by trade, diplomacy, and war—but jade is different. Since the Stone Age it has been fashioned and favored in its cultural heartlands, in each place prized above all other materials by a loyal following. While that luster has not dimmed more than eight thousand years later, generally speaking the appreciation of jade has not traveled well.
Instead, its esteem runs narrow and deep in the places that have always considered jade to be the superior stone. Around it has been constructed an inspired symbolism that is one of the most intricate in the history of gemstones, making the sometimes inscrutable jade a stone that must be studied to appreciate how profound the cultural journey of a gem can be—intertwined with a society’s understanding of the most fundamental issues of humanity: how to live long, how to live and die well, and how to prepare for what may follow.
Just as its meanings are multilayered, so too is the material itself. For gemmologists today, everything that is said and understood about jade actually refers to two distinct stones, found in various places, at different and far distant points in history. In addition, some of what has historically been referred to as jade, it would turn out, is nothing of the sort.
The catch-all Chinese word for jade—yù, a precious stone of great beauty—is one of the oldest characters in the Chinese language and has been in use for at least five thousand years.[3] It is also a suitably ambiguous label for a stone that has appeared in many forms, not all of which meet the threshold of gemmological jade. These ersatz jades include a mishmash of tough, translucent-to-opaque greenish materials such as serpentine, bowenite, amazonite, marble, quartzite, and chrysoprase. They were often grouped together by archeologists (no doubt to avoid the difficulties of gemmological classification) as “social” or “archeological” jades: similar stones that bear the same symbolic significance as jade, but whose chemistry and mineralogy are quite removed.[4]
What is classified today as “true jade” comes in only one of two forms: nephrite or jadeite. The former, which comprises almost all Chinese jade until the eighteenth century a.d., is an amphibole silicate with a microcrystalline structure, whose tiny interwoven crystals appear bound together in a rope-like manner, giving a fibrous appearance under the microscope. By contrast, jadeite, a silicate in the pyroxene family, is also composed of minute interlocking crystals, but they are clearly distinct from one another, seeming more granular. For much of their history, both nephrite and jadeite have been carved as ornamental hard stones, since they can take a fine polish, but in their highest qualities they have also formed beautiful jewels.
It is this texture that has set jade apart from other gem materials, making it more appreciated for its tactility rather than the sharp transparency so expected in other gemstones. It is also this crystalline structure that has stood nephrite and jadeite in good stead over the centuries and across cultures: the result in both cases being an extremely high durability, meaning materials that, while being immensely hard to polish, can withstand bashing and breaking. These were the perfect stones for deadly neolithic clubs and heavenly objects associated with the afterlife.
While both share a tight crystalline structure, the differences are apparent. Jadeite, which has a far richer color palette and may be found in lavender, orange, black, and white, as well as the characteristic green, has a glassier luster, not unlike that of a microcrystalline quartz, such as chalcedony. In the highest qualities, green and lavender jadeite make up all the most valued jade jewels on the auction market. Nephrite, in its shades of dark spotted green to milky white, has an appearance often described as “greasy,” a soft sheen that led its creamy-white examples to be christened “mutton fat” jade. These were the most highly prized jades of ancient China and the Mughals.
The name “jade” is actually a Mesoamerican legacy, adapted from the sixteenth-century Spanish term piedra de ijada. When the conquistadores noticed the Aztecs wearing the stone about their waists, and took it to be a cure for pains in the flank and kidney ailments, they named it “the kidney stone.”[*1] In Latin, it translated as lapis nephriticus, from whence the name “nephrite” was born.
When I think of jade, I think of China, Hong Kong, and my many stays in the region. For eight years I visited regularly on business, gaining an insight into a jewelry culture a world away from Western expectations and a luxury buyers’ demographic where jade was ubiquitous. On my second visit—bringing Princess Margaret’s collection for preview, which no doubt contributed to several of the top lots selling to the Far East—I found myself headed to the Jade Market of Yau Ma Tei in a rare moment of free time. A world away from the glitzy convention center of auctions and trade shows in Wan Chai, this was a street-level block full of stands stuffed with beads, bangles, and a million different jade look-alikes from dyed aggregates to plastic and glass.
I’m not sure if I found any true jade on that day, but if I had, I wouldn’t have known for certain: the stone is notoriously difficult to identify and subject to a host of different treatments and imitations; even the experts I know now will often send their “jade” for testing by an experienced laboratory before assuming anything. It was a clear lesson in the localized nature of the material—as a Westerner, I was not expecting to recognize it.
Jade also brings to my mind the extraordinary Mayan burial masks I have seen in the National Museum of of Anthropology in Mexico City, and the New Zealand hei-tiki pendant hidden away in my mother’s jewelry box. But above all, it takes me back to China: the first-century a.d. royal jade burial suits of the Han dynasty in the National Museum of China, in Beijing, and the enormous (more than 7 feet high) eighteenth-century sculpture of Emperor Yu controlling the flood—the largest in the country—carved in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor and housed in the Forbidden City.
Any understanding of why and how jade matters begins here, where it holds a unique and magical place in common culture. Its usage throughout Chinese history stretches back to at least 6000 b.c., when the Xinglongwa culture were making jewelry from jade and using it as part of burial rituals—with jade hoops for the ears and jade rings placed over the eyes, the beginning of a long tradition in both China and Mesoamerica that would enshrine jade’s position as a connection and conduit between this life and the next.
During subsequent millennia jade started to be fashioned into symbolic objects: jade figurines from the Hongshan culture (c. 4700–2900 b.c.) depict numerous animal forms, from the “pig dragon” hybrid that was an important burial ornament to more recognizable dragons, eagles that may have represented a connection to heaven and the soul’s upward journey in the afterlife, and turtles that could similarly have pointed to the underworld.[5] After the Hongshan came the Liangzhu (c. 3300–2300 b.c.), whose jade signature was the combination of a bi (a circular disc with a hole through the middle) and cong (a square tube with a hollowed, circular interior). The exact meaning of these objects widely found in burials is unclear, although the symbolism may have been to do with stargazing: a forerunner to the later proverbial Chinese description of astronomers “looking at heaven through a tube.”[6]
Retelling a story from around this time, an early compendium of Chinese myth and folklore, The Classic of Mountains and Seas, makes clear that jade’s amuletic value—as a protector from bad luck and evil spirits—was established early on. In reference to a legendary Chinese ruler of the 2600s b.c., it notes: “the Yellow Emperor took jade flowers from the mountains and planted them on the southern side of the Zhong Mountains…Since the ghosts and gods fed on jades, by [wearing] them, gentlemen could be protected from ominous things.”[7]
Even in these earliest jade objects, we can discern some of the unique characteristics that would come to define this gemstone throughout its history, across the disparate civilizations that prized it. One was its durability, crucial to the earliest inhabitants across Eurasia, whose tools and weapons such as jade axes and spearheads survive from not only Neolithic China but also Europe and Russia, where Alpine and Siberian jade provided local sources.[*2] [8] A second characteristic was its cradle-to-grave associations with life itself, from being a symbol of fertility to a gemstone buried with the dead—a fashion that would continue and become increasingly elaborate. And a third was that jade symbolized protection from the forces that would do us harm, something that continues today in the form of jade bangles that are routinely put around the wrists of babies in China and prized by their adult owners.[*3] These qualities and associations have endured and deepened with age, while in time new branches of symbolism would also grow, developing into even more refined and nuanced doctrines.
For the vast majority of China’s long history with jade, nephrite was predominant. Emerging from the northern Kunlun Mountains in Western China, it was found alluvially and mined directly in major centers including Hetian (modern Khotan, in Xinjiang Province), with rivers known by the Uyghurs as the Yurungkash (White Jade River) and Karakash (Black Jade River).[9] In the seventeenth century one recorded local custom was for women to be sent out to gather jade from the river at night, naked: since jade was masculine (yin) and formed by moonlight, it could best be attracted by the feminine yang of the young ladies.[10] The creamy-white and green gems that emerged were harder than the jadeite that was already being found elsewhere, but would not enter Chinese consciousness until the eighteenth century, when it began to arrive in great quantities from Burma.
When jade is mined, it may emerge in anything from small pebbles to massive boulders—one of the largest ever excavated, in 2016, was 19 feet long and weighed around 175 tons.[11] The challenge is knowing how much jade one of these rocks may contain: jade boulders are often covered with a layer of rough “skin,” and although the outward color gives a clue, jade may or may not run throughout the interior or be evenly distributed. Although “windows” can be made in an attempt to spy into the stone, these are still no guarantee of what hides within, and what prize lies (or not) beneath the surface.
Just how much hinges on the gamble that is jade is captured by the ancient story of a legendary Chinese stone that emerged from the state of Chu (modern Hubei and Hunan) in around the eighth century b.c. A man named Mr. He discovered a boulder of what he believed was such high-quality jade that he immediately brought it to the king. But the royal jeweler declared: “It is only a stone.” For the crime of having sought to defraud the king, Mr. He was condemned to have a foot amputated. When the king died, and his son acceded to the throne, Mr. He returned with his jade only to receive another negative verdict and the punishment of having his other foot cut off. After he was said to have wept tears of blood in his distress, an emissary was sent to question him, and was told: “I do not grieve because my feet have been cut off. I grieve because a precious jewel is dubbed a mere stone, and a man of integrity is called a deceiver.” His find was finally reevaluated, polished up until its true worth was revealed, and cut into a priceless bi disc.[12] Centuries later, this jewel would supposedly be at the center of a battle between two warring Chinese states, one of whose rulers offered the wealth of fifteen cities for the object (before reneging on the deal)—the origin of the Chinese saying that jade is “worth many cities.”[13]
Once the jade has been extracted, working with it becomes the next challenge. Nephrite’s tightly crystalline structure makes it a difficult stone to craft even with modern tools, which renders the highly developed Neolithic jade trade all the more remarkable. Hand-cranked rotary machines with abrasives were being used from around 3500 b.c., and a reconstruction of traditional techniques estimated that cutting a jade pebble into a flat disc would have been the work of more than sixty-eight hours.[14] By the Chinese Bronze Age, vessels were being hollowed out, and inlays of bronze, turquoise, or contrasting colors of jade were being used.[15]
As tools and techniques progressed, the story of jade in China was evolving in other ways. By the age of Confucius (c. 551–479 b.c.), late in what is known as the Spring and Autumn period, a unique development occurred, not seen in the history of other gem materials. There was an increasing emphasis on a new dimension of jade—as a philosopher’s stone, a gem that did not just contain value but conveyed virtues and carried strong ethical associations.
In describing jade, Confucius identified eleven de (virtues) that epitomized core aspects of his abiding ethical philosophy of decent human behavior: acting with kindness, respecting one’s elders, and the importance of ritual. Each element of jade corresponded with a human virtue—its polish stood for purity, its hardness suggested intelligence, its color represented loyalty, etc.—thus making the material itself a moral guide.[16] Men were encouraged to wear jade pendants to influence their actions. As Confucius wrote in his Book of Odes, “when I think of a wise man, he seems to be like jade.”[17] The Confucian mantle was taken up six centuries later by the politician and scholar Xu Shen, who associated jade with just five virtues: the warmth of its luster standing for kindness, its translucent appearance for honesty, its “tranquil” tone for wisdom, its durability for bravery, and its sharp edges that he specified were “not intended for violence” but rather for integrity.[*4]
In the hands of Chinese philosophers, jade had transcended the traditional matrix for determining the value of a gemstone—its beauty, rarity, and durability. When asked why jade was so richly valued and soapstone not at all, Confucius replied that it was not due so much to the comparative rarity of jade, but the stone was so esteemed because of its symbolic value. Jade had, in other words, taken on a life and meaning beyond the physical qualities of its material. It could impart the lessons of how to live as well as acting as an actual bridge to the afterlife. The “Stone of Heaven,” as it has become known, had uniquely developed a didactic function as much as a decorative one. It was the ultimate manifestation of the characteristics associated with a civilized existence and a life well lived: something utterly invaluable.
Confucius and those who followed him had elevated jade, but in doing so they had not diverged from its fundamental and long-standing symbolic tradition. The notion that jade has perennially been the stone that represents life, death, the afterlife, and everything in between, reached its zenith during the Han dynasty (220 b.c.–a.d. 220), with the creation of some of the most unusual and remarkable gemmological objects ever discovered: full burial suits crafted from several thousand plates of jade.
The use of jade as a burial item went back millennia. It had begun with the interment of ritual jade objects and developed during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 b.c.) into jade face masks, constructed from forty to eighty pieces of jade sewn together onto cloth, often incorporating animal imagery. As the art historian Wu Hung has suggested, such objects merged the belief in jade’s protective power with the idea that body and soul could find new form in the afterlife, with death considered a process first of preservation and then transformation. “Because of the extraordinary hardness and beauty of jade, this natural material was bestowed with magical power to protect or transform the dead…Particular jade artifacts were created at this time to transform the corpse into an awesome, supernatural being.”[18]
The yu yi—burial suits—of the Han took this concept even further. In the most elaborate of them, the jade is shaped to represent facial features—fashioned into the form of the nose and ears. There are jade fingers, realistic anatomical curves, and for Liu Sheng, Prince of Zhongshan, in the second century b.c., even a set of genitals “to preserve the prince’s sexuality and generativity.”[19] These astonishing creations were thought to be mythical—recorded in the literature but as yet undiscovered—until Liu’s tomb was excavated in 1968. And the suit itself was only one part of a comprehensive jade assemblage within the burial. The body underneath had already been “sealed” with jade plugs, one for every single orifice of the body, and overlaid with jade bi discs. The plugs represented the base layer of protection for the body and soul from the ravages of death. Without them, as the first-century philosopher Wang Chong argued, the “spirit” of a person would escape the body like rice spilling out of the hole in a sack.[20] This idea of sealing the body was furthered by lining the coffin itself with jade.
The function of jade in this context was both physical and spiritual: preserving the body from decay as much as holding in the spirit. It was also about transforming the body into something greater, facilitating the transition from earth to heaven and equipping it for what was believed to come next.[21] In this way, the jade burial suits of the Han dynasty were not only astonishing products of material craftsmanship. They also represented an expression of belief in the power of this gemstone to protect, sustain, and reshape life, even after death.
Such beliefs were not a singular Chinese phenomenon. They also formed the basis of jade’s appreciation by the civilizations of Mesoamerica, from the Olmec (c. 1400–400 b.c.) who occupied the Gulf of Mexico, to the Maya who spanned parts of modern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, and the peoples who made up the eventual Aztec Empire in central Mexico (1428–1521). For the Mesoamericans, jade served a wide variety of ritualistic and symbolic purposes, spanning status and protection, as well as fertility and cosmology.
For the Olmec, who sourced their bright bluish-green jadeite from the Motagua River Valley in Guatemala,[*5] one of the fundamental jade objects was the celt—a rounded axe-head used as a farming tool. Some were inscribed with cosmological imagery—the Mesoamerican version of jade as the Stone of Heaven and Earth.[22] Many were engraved with the image of the Olmec maize deity, and would be planted in the ground to promote the growth of crops. Long jade perforators—whose function it was to let blood from the ears, tongue, or genitals—were also used in Olmec and Mayan fertility practices, in offerings made for both crops and the well-being of the community. Self-mutilation through bloodletting was a power play especially for the elite, a public reminder of their communion with the gods, also indicated by the numbers of perforators found in high-ranking Olmec graves.[23]
Elsewhere jade was used in high-society status symbols, notably in headdresses, ear piercings (including large ear flares), and pectoral ornaments, but also in dental modifications. Mayan burials attest to the practice of drilling and inserting small jade roundels into the front teeth, most likely for simple cosmetic reasons—but possibly also for protective, tribal, religious, or intimidatory purposes. Jade was, more straightforwardly, the first choice for rulers across a broad swath of Mesoamerican history. “In Classic Maya art,” the historian Karl Taube has written, “jade is so inextricably linked to images of Maya rulers that it is difficult to conceive of them without this precious stone,” also suggesting that one way in which potentates established dominance over conquered rivals was to remove their jade jewelry from them.[24]
Jade remained a preferred royal adornment right up to the end of the Aztec Empire. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who was with Cortés during his conquest of the Aztecs, described how Montezuma II arrived at one of his negotiations with the Spanish, carried on a litter topped with “a canopy of exceedingly great value, decorated with green feathers, gold, silver, chalchihuis [jade] stones, and pearls.”[25]
One notable aspect of the Mesoamerican craze for jade was how closely its symbolism and cultural references overlapped with the ideas of life, death, and the afterlife in China. The connection that the breath of life and the soul were transmitted through the ears and mouth as facilitated by jade was prominent in both cultures. Numerous fantastic Mayan jade burial masks share similarities with the Chinese jade burial suits. The vivid jade death mask of the Maya ruler Pakal the Great, who reigned for sixty-eight years in the seventh century, with perforators poking through ear ornaments and obsidian eyes glaring out, is just one extraordinary example.[*6] Bartolomé de las Casas, a Spanish Dominican friar, provided some insight into the beliefs that underpinned this practice, with reference to the Poqomam, a Maya people spanning Guatemala and El Salvador. “When it appears then that some lord is dying, they had ready a precious stone which they placed at his mouth when he appeared to expire, in which they believe that they took the spirit, and on expiring, they very lightly rubbed his face with it. It takes the breath, soul or spirit.”[26] For the Maya, this was a holistic concept: jade associated with the wind that blew rain onto the life-giving maize fields, and with capturing the final breath of a person that represented their soul.
The fertility associations touching on birth as well as the life-giving necessity of the harvest are summed up by a mythical story surrounding Huitzilihuitl, king of Tenochtitlán (the center of modern-day Mexico City and one of the three city-states that would soon unite to become the Aztec Empire). The king had sought a diplomatic marriage alliance with a neighboring ruler but been laughed out of court, his messengers sent away and told not to return. His counterpart, ruler of the cotton-producing Cuernavaca region, openly mocked any suitor who he said could only afford to clothe his daughter in the traditional agave plant fibers. But the king of Tenochtitlán was not deterred. Rather than retreating to lick his wounds, he consulted his deity and, so the folkloric story goes, took a more direct approach. “He stood within the boundaries of the lord of Cuernavaca. Then he shot a dart, a prettily painted and marvelously crafted reed, in the center of which was inserted a precious jade—most valuable and shimmering brightly.” His aim was true and the gem landed almost in the lap of the girl whose hand in marriage he had sought. Entranced by the gemstone, she put it in her mouth and accidentally swallowed it. She fell pregnant, they married after all, and their child, Montezuma I, became the second Aztec emperor (r. 1440–69).[27]
Framing jade as a gem of royalty, fertility, and destiny, the tale neatly captures what made this gemstone such a long-standing cultural icon across the contrasting civilizations that prized it. These included the Maori, Eastern Polynesian settlers who arrived in New Zealand in the second half of the thirteenth century, a people entirely reliant on neolithic technologies. One of their most important finds was nephrite from the South Island. They called this “greenstone” pounamu and applied the same name to a nearly identical silicate called bowenite, using both to hunt, fish, build, and carve canoes and spears. Yet the stone was symbolic as well as practical, summed up by the use of jade to manufacture two significant Maori objects: the hei-tiki (neck ornaments) and mere (paddle-shaped clubs).
The former were highly stylized flattened carved jade figurines worn as necklaces that held links back to one’s ancestors and may have represented Tiki, the first man in Maori mythology, or a fertility goddess.[28] One was brought back by Captain Cook after his first voyage and presented to King George III in 1771; he would subsequently return with European-made versions to offer in return.[*7] [29] The mere was both a practical weapon, designed for clubbing and slicing, and an important ritual object, a status symbol that would be passed down through generations. Its power—mana—was believed to increase with the succession of owners and the finest examples were owned by chiefs and accorded supernatural properties. One ruler’s mere “was said to be invisible to his enemies, and to hide itself and reappear at his call.”[30] It was also deemed an honor to be killed using such a sacred weapon: captured leaders were known to surrender their own mere so that it could be used to strike the fatal blow.
For these three contrasting cultures in which jade was a common thread, the meaning and majesty of the gem was deep-rooted and ancient. Yet its history was not static, and the story of jade continued to find new ways to unfold. In particular, new discoveries and prominent patrons would help to refresh the relevance of jade, ensuring it sustained its cultural dominance into the modern world.
In all the long history of Chinese jade adoration and appreciation, one figure stands out. A long-reigning ruler who obsessively penned hundreds of poems about jade and owned tens of thousands of jade objects, the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796), it is probably no exaggeration to say, was the most committed jade connoisseur of all time. As well as studying and writing about the stone, he was known for playing an active role in the design and production of jade objects by his court craftsmen, going into painstaking levels of detail and inspecting both designs and raw materials before allowing work to proceed. He had old-fashioned aesthetic preferences: he scolded makers who indulged in overelaborate designs that deviated from traditional models, and even requested that antique signatures be baked into some objects to fake their age.[31]
The emperor’s jade carvings were more than a personal interest: they also provided a medium through which to connect the achievements of his reign, especially in territorial conquest, to familiar Chinese symbols and beliefs. After the Qing had seized what is now Xinjiang from the Mongols in 1761, the emperor was encouraged by his nephew to commission a set of jade chimes to mark the victory, which had brought a major jade-producing region back under Chinese rule. By commissioning the jade chimes—a Confucian symbol of harmony and good governance—with stone from the territory he had just conquered, the Qianlong Emperor was underlining his legitimacy as a ruler, his connection to sacred Chinese beliefs, and the righteousness of his military exploits.[32]
As well as keeping a tight rein on his own craftsmen, the Qianlong Emperor coveted the jades that were being manufactured elsewhere, notably in Mughal India. They were the subject of more than seventy of his jade poems, one of which noted, perhaps ruefully, that “although Khotan produces both raw and carved jade, all the best carvings are from Hindustan.”[33] By the time of his reign, the Mughal expertise in jade carving was well established, having been nurtured under the rule of Jahangir and then Shah Jahan in the previous century.
The best Mughal jades were creamy-white “mutton fat” jades, originating from Hetian in Xinjiang, but carved with incomparable finesse for the Mughal courts. Some cups were so fine that they were practically translucent, the light passing through their edges as if through sheer white porcelain.[*8] It was jades like this to which the emperor was referring in his poem “In Praise of a Hindustani Drinking Vessel,” when he wrote of “water mills grinding the jade as thin as paper.”[34]
Such was the quality of the Mughal work and the Qianlong Emperor’s admiration for it that a two-way trade became established in his reign, by which Chinese jade would be exported to India for manufacture, and the products reimported; he also urged his own craftsmen to imitate the styles that were emerging from the Indian workshops. Mughal decadence dictated that many jade objects had a banqueting function, from wine goblets to serving bowls, although in common with other jade-admiring cultures, Mughal craftsmen also fashioned weaponry, including hilts and sheaths for swords or daggers, and even archers’ rings.[*9] [35] Equally, jade was already established as a material of symbolic importance to the Timurids, the Mughals’ cherished ancestors, who had imbued its associations with life, death, and the afterlife. In 1425 the future Timurid emperor Ulugh Beg obtained a huge jade slab that he set over the burial site of his grandfather Timur (Tamerlane) in Samarkand.[36]
The Qianlong Emperor’s jade legacy would be significant: not only had he been a proactive and demanding patron of China’s jade industry, but the military campaigns of his reign had brought two major jade-producing regions under the banner of the Qing dynasty: the mountains of Khotan to the west, and to the south, the mines of the Kachin Hills in the northern region of modern Myanmar. The second of these was of massive importance, as it marked the introduction to China of jadeite jade—the vivid green gem known as fei cui (named after the bright iridescent feathers of the kingfisher). This exceptional Burmese jadeite would cause a sensation and cast nephrite—the staple of Chinese jade from which all the Qianlong Emperor’s signature pieces had been crafted—into the shade.
The import of jadeite into China began in his reign, but it would not be until the nineteenth century, and the influence of another royal jade fanatic, that so-called “imperial jade” became part of the gem’s long-running story in China. This more modern devotee was Empress Dowager Cixi (r. 1861–1908), one of the most powerful women in the history of Imperial China, de facto ruler of the Qing dynasty in its twilight years. For Cixi, who supposedly possessed enough jewels to fill three thousand sandalwood boxes, jade was both a personal favorite and a symbol of her authority: the imperial seal she was presented on her sixtieth birthday was cut from jade, with an elaborate handle comprising two interlocking dragons.[37] She had rings of jade, jade objects decorating her bedroom, jade chopsticks to eat with, she applied her lipstick with a jade hairpin, and she drank her tea in the gardens of the Summer Palace from a jade cup, flavored with rose, honeysuckle, and jasmine flowers that would be brought to her in a jade bowl.[38]
The Empress Dowager was not just a collector but a market maker. Her other great gemstone obsession, pink tourmaline from a mine in Pala, San Diego County, became so sought after in nineteenth-century China as a result of her influence that it created a boom in the Californian tourmaline industry. More than a century after her death, Chinese demand for this relatively unheralded gemstone remains.[39] Cixi had similar pulling power when it came to jade, helping to cement the popularity of vivid green jadeite objects, such as the pearl-fringed ring she wore for an American artist, Katharine Carl, when she painted her portrait in 1904.[40] Her final flourish in jade came with her burial, where the Empress Dowager was entombed alongside a panoply of white and green objects resembling those she had so prized in life. Carved jade butterflies decorated her hair, watermelons rested by her feet, alongside both white- and green-peeled melons, a lotus leaf, ten peaches, two cabbages, and twenty-seven miniature Buddhas, jadeites all.[*10] [41]
Late Imperial China was not the only place where jade was flourishing at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. A major discovery of Siberian nephrite in 1826, with another major find in 1851, became part of the Fabergé repertoire of home-grown gems produced for the tsars, used to carve a variety of boxes and vessels, as well as featuring on several of the Imperial Eggs.[42]
It was with Fabergé—who had opened their first European shop in London in 1903 to better serve such patrons as King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra[43]—that jade began to make its presence felt on the Western jewelry scene. By the 1920s a fashion for orientalizing jewels saw jadeite appearing in jewelry and vanity cases by the likes of Cartier, displaying striking, contrasting color combinations—of green, red, black—that were emblematic of the movement. Jade became part of the stock of Western jewelers who were looking to imitate Eastern styles and colors, though without ever coming close to matching the status that the gem held in China and elsewhere.
In America, it was one of the richest women in the world who took the lead in buying into the oriental aesthetic and who was one of the keenest collectors of jade in the West. That was Barbara Hutton, the original Million Dollar Baby, granddaughter of the retail tycoon Frank Winfield Woolworth. On her twenty-first birthday, she gained access to a trust fund worth just shy of $50 million (the near equivalent to $1 billion today). Yet she would live a troubled existence despite her vast wealth: her mother died by suicide when she was four years old, and Hutton married and divorced on seven occasions, the third time to Cary Grant (a union the press dubbed “Cash and Cary”). “I suppose it is incomprehensible to the average person that a girl who was as beautiful as Barbara could have inherited a sense of inadequacy along with forty-five million dollars” was the arch verdict of the gossip columnist Elsa Maxwell.[44]
Amid all this difficulty, one thing Hutton could love without complication was jewelry. Already obsessed with jade from an early age, she would visit the Asian specialist store Gump’s as a young girl to learn what to look for in the stone and how to spot a counterfeit.[45] She followed the reports of the looting of Cixi’s tomb in 1928.[46] On her trip to Shanghai in 1934 she purchased a jadeite bangle that had once belonged to Empress Cixi herself.[47]
Hutton’s most celebrated jadeite jewel, however, was a record-breaker of epic proportions: a spectacular necklace of twenty-seven enormous, delicious, translucent, and matching vivid green jadeite beads. Presented on the occasion of her first marriage in 1933, the jade beads were sent to Cartier to be mounted on a simple diamond clasp, and, a year later, on a more striking circular ruby and diamond closure.
This necklace first came up for auction in 1988, setting a world record and selling for $2 million; when it reappeared on the auction block six years later in 1994 it doubled that record, achieving $4.2 million; and finally, at its last auction appearance in 2014, it broke the record once more, this time realizing an incredible $27 million, making it easily the most expensive jadeite jewel to go under the hammer.[48] The buyer was Cartier, who acquired it for their own historic Cartier Collection.
When it came up on public view in 2014, one look was enough to confirm that this was a truly stunning world-class jewel. One piece of jadeite of such an even and intense translucent green is rare on its own, but to have so many large beads (between 15.4 and 19.2 millimeters, or approximately ½ to ¾ inch), perfectly matched in color and size, and of such fine texture and translucency, was simply remarkable. This was a level of quality that would be difficult to surpass, and rumors circulated at the time of the sales that the jade had all come from a single famous boulder, and that the beads were originally worn in eighteenth-century Imperial China.[49]
Holding this necklace took me a step closer to understanding a gemstone that can often feel as if it lives in a world of its own, whose meaning and importance are not intuitive but need to be learned. But looking at these jadeites, like a string of juicy grapes or crunchy apples all in a line, it was impossible not to get it. There was something about the vivid green of the color that drew me in and made immediate sense of the jade’s long-standing connection to life itself. You can see why this is a gemstone people might fall in love with and never want to stop collecting; why Empress Cixi used to carry little jadeite cabbages around just to play with.[50] It is vibrant and vivacious—not so much shining as almost appearing to come alive.
Like a window being polished onto a newly excavated nephrite boulder, this experience had brought me closer to the gemmological wonder and cultural phenomenon that is jade: a material that has been so much more than a gemstone for the civilizations that have revered it. Jade is extraordinary not just for its aesthetic qualities, but for the comprehensive utility it has shown across eight thousand years in human hands, serving almost every purpose you could imagine. Jade has been functional: a tool for farming and fighting. It has been ceremonial: part of rituals from bloodletting to burial. It has been a decorative marker of status, from hairpins to whole body suits, and it has been amuletic in its perceived ability to offer power and protection. And, uniquely among gemstones, it has been adopted as a vessel for ethics and morality.
The story of jade is a true gemstone epic, one that has spoken to some of the deepest human concerns and achieved totemic status in some of humanity’s most influential civilizations. Other gems have traveled farther and had more universal relevance than jade, but none has gone so far in inspiring such deep cultural allegiance or provoking so much thought about the nature of our lives on earth, and what it means to live them to the fullest.