In many languages, the name jade comes from the color green. In its purest form, however, jade is white. Traces of pollution give a range of rainbow shades of red, yellow, violet, brown, black and rarely blue. It is usually considered a "Chinese stone", but there is no evidence that it is mined in China.
The most popular jade today, called "imperial", was known only in the latest Chinese dynasty, Ch'ing. Few things larger than buttons and ornaments were made of imperial jade in this great country until about a dozen years before Imperial China was wiped out by the 1911 revolution.
Have you ever touched jade? Do you know its freshness and hard sweetness? You may be wondering, "How can a substance be hard and soft?"
In a modern measure of relative hardness called the Mohs scale (talc 1 to diamond 10), jade gets 6.75 and 6.50 in both forms. Because jade is hard, it must be polished to a high gloss. The resulting satin surface is gentle on the skin. After polishing, jade slides through the fingers and is cool to the touch.
The term jade is used for two minerals: nephrite and jadeite. Due to the interaction between calcium, magnesium and water, amphibian nephrite forms closer to the earth's surface than jadeite. It's just magnesium silicate. Nephrite, not jadeite, is jade of ancient Chinese art.
Jadeite is a pyroxene, an aluminum silicate, and was not used at all in China until 1784. That year it was known that this stone was imported from Burma. Four years earlier, jadeite was found in its current geological environment on the Tawmaw Plateau, 110 kilometers from Mogaung, Burma. So far, only occasional pebbles and rocks have been found in the area downstream of secondary sites. A job source has now been discovered. Due to the monsoons, the quarry can only be used a few months of the year. Of the 10,000 stones (actually boulders) carved from Burmese soil, there can only be one of excellent quality.
In addition to the Chinese emperors, jade was a royal stone for others. For example, the penultimate tsar of all Russians, Alexander III, is in a jade sarcophagus of spinach with black spots. On the spinach jade, the dark green sea evenly distributed the grains of black graphite, the "spring" feathers.
A ruler from another time and place looked in disbelief at a Spaniard, Hernando Cortés, who preferred gold to jade. On the question, this ruler, the famous Aztec Moctezuma, would have placed the Quetzal bird's jade, turquoise and green feathers in gold. Their jade was jadeite, which differed from Burmese jadeite only in traces of diopside, a complex silicate. Xochimilco, Mexico, now known for its floating gardens, is believed to be the main center of the Aztecs' concise work.
The Aztec kings found a permanent jade monument with the color of the incredible Quetzal bird. Half a world away, the emperors of China called jade Fei T'sui, the word for another bird, the kingfisher.
Where did the Chinese get their nephrite from before they imported jadeite from Burma in the 18th century? For more than 2,000 years, legendary "dragon tears" have been brought to four-meter-high slabs in the Takla Makan Desert in Khotan-Yarkand, Chinese Turkestan. Marco Polo must have seen jade (nephrite) at Khotan in 1272 and later called it "jasper and chalcedony." Some nephrites also come from a still modern source, Lake Baikal in Siberia.
Yes, jade, "greenstone" - Pounamou in Maori, Kyauksein in Burmese, and Chalchihuitl in the dead language of the Aztecs - were the stone of the kings of China. The ancient Chinese pictogram of jade consists of three horizontal lines and a vertical line, representing three jade plates tied to a rope. With the exception of one point, the character of jade today is the same as that of the king. The dot separates the permanent jewel from the mortal monarch.