JADEITE - Canadian Institute of Gemmology

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junction with the Nansant stream. Some twenty years ago Sanka was celebrated for its
output of fine jade, but the supply has long been exhausted, and the place is now almost
deserted. I spent the greater part of a day in visiting the excavations of former years.
Thousands of pits had been dug along the sides of the low hills and in the small intervening
valleys. The diameter of the pits rarely exceeded ten or twelve feet at the mouth, and the
average depth was about twelve feet... Sanka is the last of the 'old mines'.
The earliest account of the Burmese jadeite mines in Western sources that is mentioned by Bleeck
(1908: 254) was written in 1836 by Captain Hannay, who obtained specimens of jadeite from
Mogaung during his visit to the Assam frontier (Hannay 1837, and see Hannay 1857). Hannay,
however, did not visit the actual mines. Dr. William Griffith (1847: 132) was the first Westerner to
visit the nearby mining area. Even at that early date, he noticed that "the surface of the valley
apparently at one time consisted of low rounded hillocks; it is now much broken, and choked up
with the earth and stones that have been thrown up by excavating." He reported that the larger
jadeite boulders were broken apart by fire. After leaving the mining area a member of his party
counted a large number of people transporting jadeite rocks, the majority of them being Chinese
Shan.
More substantial jadeite mining did not commence until 1881 (Hansford 1968: 46). These
mines came to be referred to as the 'new mines'. Warry (1888, quoted in Hertz 1912) has this to say
about them:
The 'new mines' have produced immense quantities of stone, but none which approaches in
quality that yielded by the quarries of former years. It will be convenient here to indicate
briefly by points of difference between the old stone and the new. The value of jade is
determined mainly by the colour, which should be a particular shade of dark green. The
colour however, is by no means everything; semi-transparency, brilliancy, and hardness are
also essential. Stone which satisfies these four conditions is very rare. The last three
qualities were possessed to perfection by a large proportion of the old stone, but the darkgreen
colour was rare and often absent altogether. The new stone, on the other hand,
possess abundant colour, but is defective in the other three respects, being as a rule opaque,
dull and brittle in composition. These natural defects are aggravated by the injurious
methods employed in quarrying the new stone. A peculiarity which gave high value to all
stone found at the old mines was that [it] occurred in the form of moderate size round
lumps, having often the appearance of water-worn boulders, and small enough to be
detached and carried away without undergoing any rough process of cleavages on the spot.
At the new mines the stone occurs in immense blocks which cannot be quarried out by any
tools possessed by the Kachins [Jingpho], but have to be broken up by the application of
heat, a process which, without doubt, tends to make the stone more brittle and chalk-like.
These defects were not fully realized the first year that the new mines were opened. The
output of stone was large and the competition keen. Hitherto only men of some capital had
been able to engage regularly in the trade. It had been impossible to do more than guess at
the value of any old stone, for each piece was complete in itself and was usually protected
by a thick outer capsule which effectually concealed the colour within. All pieces therefore
fetched a high price, as any piece might on cutting prove to be of immense value. But with
the opening of the new mines, stone could not be bought in fragments of any shape and
size, and it was possible by the processes of washing and holding in a strong light to
determine with comparative exactitude the amount and nature of the colour. The trade was