aggregate
Nephrite
- Also known as
- mutton-fat jadepounamugreenstone
- Crystal system
- monoclinic
- Hardness
- 6–6.5 on the Mohs scale
- Lustre
- greasy
- Colour
- Green, cream, grey, black
- Where it forms
- Where serpentinite meets silica-rich rock, producing a dense felted mass of microscopic amphibole fibres. That felted structure is what makes it so hard to break.
- Chiefly from
- Xinjiang, ChinaBritish Columbia, CanadaSouth Island, New ZealandSiberia, Russia
Why it is that colour
Iron content. Iron-poor nephrite is the pale cream mutton-fat jade most prized in China; more iron gives the darker spinach greens.
Safety
Safe to handle and exceptionally durable.
Where it comes from
Chinese Xinjiang material from Hotan is the classical source and is now largely depleted and extremely expensive. Canadian and Russian production supplies most of the world market. In New Zealand, ownership of all pounamu in its natural state was returned to Ngai Tahu under the 1997 settlement, and its extraction is governed by the iwi.
Historical use
Worked into ritual bi discs and cong tubes in Neolithic China with abrasives and string alone, since nothing available was hard enough to cut it. Maori toki and hei-tiki are pounamu and carry genealogical significance, passing between generations.
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
The jade of Chinese tradition, going back to the Neolithic Hongshan and Liangzhu cultures more than five thousand years ago, and associated in Confucian writing with specific virtues — its hardness with intelligence, its warmth with benevolence, its sound when struck with music. This is one of the deepest and best-documented stone traditions in the world. Maori tradition around pounamu in New Zealand is entirely independent and equally substantial.
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
Nephrite is a rock rather than a mineral, and that is not a technicality here — it is the source of its most important property. It is an interlocking mat of microscopic amphibole fibres, and to break it you have to break across the grain of a felt. Nephrite is tougher than steel in the specific sense of resistance to fracture, and it is the toughest natural stone commonly worked.
That property is why cultures without metal could make thin ring-discs and long adze blades from it, and why those objects survive. It also made it a weapon: the Maori mere pounamu is a short club, and a material that will not chip is exactly what such a thing requires.
Identity checked against IMA-CNMNC master list, June 2025.