Jade trade in Myanmar
The majority of the production is carried out by Myanma Gem Enterprise (MGE), a state-owned venture which has enough liquid assets to run itself for 172 years.
[5] In addition to this region, there are also notable mines in the neighboring Sagaing District, near the towns of Nasibon and Natmaw and Hkamti.
At the Maw Sisa mine, for example, large boulders are extracted by heavy earth-moving machines and then moved by truck to the nearby river for washing and processing.
Today, Myanma Gems Enterprise (MGE) cuts through the whole boulder to reveal pockets of jade (see previous citation).
[7] The Chinese believe that the wearer of jade will be constantly reminded of the strength in resilience and toughness that build one's character.
It has been suggested that the production of Burmese jadeite might stretch as far back as the Pyu city-states period in Myanmar (roughly third to eighth centuries CE) on relatively small scales.
[8][9] The first indications of long-distance trade of the gem begin during the reign of Burma's King Anawratha (1044) to the kingdom of Nancho (present-day Yunnan province) and Beijing in China.The king, being a religious man and believing that the Chinese emperor possessed the relics of Buddha, wished to obtain some relics from the Chinese emperor in exchange for Burmese imperial jade.
His army suffered multiple failures, leading the Qianlong Emperor to say "my finest soldiers were scalded, divided, driven into gullies like cows in a pond.
The discovery that green jade of fine quality occurred in Northern Burma was made accidentally by a small Yunnanese trader in the thirteenth century.
Another attempt, equally fruitless, was made by the Yunnan Government in the fourteenth century to discover the stone; all the members of the expedition, it is said, perished by malaria, or at the hands of hostile hill-tribes.
Small pieces of the stone occasionally found their way across the frontier, but the exact source of the supply continued unknown.
As stated in the previous paragraph, most notably during the Qing dynasty, during the Qianlong Emperor's lifetime, he acquired much jade from Burma.
With the support of the Burmese government, regular trade routes between the jade tract and China traveling north into Yunnan were established as early as 1798.
The Kachins were granted ownership over the jade they mined in return for paying fees on the transport of their goods beyond Mogaung.
In 1945, the British regained Burma but little progress was made in rehabilitating the mines, due to unsettled political conditions.
The end of the Chinese Civil War closed Yunnan's border and brought the jade trade with China to a halt.
Consequently, the jade produced in the Kachin state was now transported by rail to Rangoon where it was then exported by sea to Hong Kong.
Trading companies often served the role of providing capital services and risk insurance for jade sellers in the event of lost or stolen products.
Often these companies would have preferential relationships with clients that had a reputation for skillfully identifying valuable jade stones for sale.
Two notable militias were the KMT lead for a time by Mi Li and the army led by Khun Sa.
From 1964 onwards, the Ministry of Mines set up the Myanmar Gems Enterprise to manage the sale of jade at government-controlled auctions in Rangoon.
[2] Recently Myanmar's jade industry has expanded substantially in response to increasing demand for the stone in Chinese markets with jade export revenues rising from $150–300 million USD in the early 2000s to US$1.75 billion during the 2010-2011 fiscal year, which accounts for a fifth of Myanmar's total export revenue.
Conflict between the Burmese army (Tatmadaw) and the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO) have had a severe impact of jade extraction and transportation.
In 2015 the Burmese government negotiated peace agreements with 15 of the 17 ethnic groups, but conflict between the Tatmadaw and the KIO's army continues.
As a matter of fact, the war between the two sides has intensified, causing great uncertainty about the future of Myanmar's jade trade.
As a response to the government's handling of the 2007 Saffron Revolution several nations have issued sanctions against the Burmese gemstone market.
It was ascertained that in 2014, Myanmar's ruling elite had appropriated roughly US$31 billion worth of jade, figuring nearly 50% of the nation's economy.
[19] In August 2023, 34 miners are missing and eight hospitalized after a landslide consisting of wall of mud, rocks and floodwater at a jade mine in Hpakant.
