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Know It If You Saw It? Better Than Gold.


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Sunday, and i should go hunt for something...

there are rocks out there not in the fields in the USA, but they can be found in shops and rummage sales as items carried home by travelers from exotic lands. the stone I'm referring to is a very special white jade found in a specific area in China. the jade is hetian nephrite and comes from an area in Xin Jiang, China very near Turkey. it is easily confused with other white nephrites and tons of other white jades are passed off as hetian, the differences in the materials are slight, but the difference in value is tremendous.

the most valuable of the hetian jades and most highly prized by collectors are fatty pure white specimens found in river beds with the outer matrix worn off by the action of the water and surrounding gravels. the very highest quality hetian nephrite will fetch in the neighborhood of $1000.00 per gram US dollars. This jade has been prized for centuries and spurred a movement of sorts not unlike California's gold rush, the entire area is now off limits and under state protection from the ravages of collectors. 

The gold nugget is 9.5 grams and the little jade fish is 5.2 grams, the nugget is worth in the $400. range depending on the buyer this little fish from the studio of Xio Fan in Suzho, China would bring close to $10,000.00 (or a new GPZ) from a knowledgeable buyer. in the second picture is another hetian pebble of aprox 30 grams a slightly lesser quality, but showing very good skin, alongside the little fish for comparison. the slight differences in color and clarity drop the value by as much as 1/2 of the top quality per gram.

so if you are out hunting in in odd shops and come across a curious little white rock some traveler carried home from vacation???

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I'm happy you found this interesting, my wife introduced me to jade about ten years ago and i was completely blown away by how much money some of this stuff goes for. The green imperial jadeite is even more expensive, I've seen small carvings for sale in China of the size you would wear or carry in a pocket for prices in the millions of dollars. 

 

you have to be very careful with all of this stuff and a lot of people have lost a lot of money on fake and treated jade and thats mostly whats out there for sale. the fake treated jade looks really good too, but has only decorative value. my friends in Nian, China took me to a major jade market area in the city and in one section of the town all the streets were stained a dark red brown from the uncontrolled run off of stain used to dye the outside of jade and other stone to make it look like the skin on hetian jade.

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Wait Jade is a rock?? I just figured it was a good sripper name. I'm learning things everyday.

 

China's a confusing place and you are not to far off... the word "Yu" in chinese can be a name of a person (stripper), jade stone, fish, rain... slight change in tone and context. so just knowing that one word could get you just about everything you need, but not necessarily in the order you would like.

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