silicates
Jadeite
NaAlSi2O6
- Also known as
- imperial jadefeicui
- Crystal system
- monoclinic
- Hardness
- 6.5–7 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- vitreous
- Colour
- Green, lavender, white, orange, black
- Where it forms
- Only under high pressure and relatively low temperature — the conditions found where one tectonic plate is being forced beneath another. Jadeite deposits mark ancient subduction zones, which is why there are so few of them.
- Chiefly from
- Kachin State, MyanmarMotagua Valley, GuatemalaJapanRussia
Why it is that colour
Chromium gives the intense emerald green of imperial jade; iron gives duller greens; manganese gives lavender. The finest colour depends on very small amounts of chromium in an otherwise colourless mineral.
Safety
Safe to handle. Much commercial jadeite is bleached with acid and impregnated with polymer, known in the trade as B-jade, which degrades over time; dyed material is C-jade.
Where it comes from
This is the worst supply chain in the collection. Kachin State in northern Myanmar produces almost all imperial jadeite, the trade has been valued in the tens of billions of dollars annually, and Global Witness and others have documented its role in financing armed conflict, its control by military-linked companies, and repeated landslide disasters at Hpakant killing hundreds of scavenging miners at a time.
Historical use
The Olmec, Maya and Aztec worked Motagua jadeite for masks, celts and ornaments and ranked it above every other material. In China, jadeite became the dominant imperial stone in the Qing period and remains the most valuable jade in the East Asian market.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. That a stone was used for something establishes that people used it, not that it worked.
What is attributed to it, and since when
Chinese tradition around jade is genuinely ancient, extensive and continuous, and it is one of the most thoroughly documented stone traditions anywhere — but for most of that history the material was nephrite, not jadeite. Jadeite reached China from Burma in quantity only in the eighteenth century. Mesoamerican jadeite use is independent and ancient, centred on the Motagua valley, and the Olmec and Maya valued it above gold.
Described, not endorsed. Dating a claim is not the same as assessing it — but an association that first appears in a book published in 1985 is not an ancient inheritance, whatever the label says. A sincere account of feeling better is compatible with the stone doing nothing — see the placebo effect.
Sold as this, but not
Worth knowing
Jade is not one material. It is two unrelated minerals that were called the same thing because they look and behave alike, and the distinction was only made in 1863, when the French mineralogist Alexis Damour analysed Burmese and Chinese material and found they were chemically different.
Jadeite is a pyroxene; nephrite is an amphibole. Both are exceptionally tough — not hard, but resistant to breaking, because both are made of interlocked fibres — which is why both could be worked into thin blades and rings by cultures without metal tools, and why both were valued wherever they were found.
The Burmese trade is difficult to write about neutrally. It is enormous, it is opaque, and the people digging in the tailings at Hpakant are periodically buried by them. Anyone buying jadeite is buying into that chain, and there is currently no reliable way to buy out of it.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.