Who knows the stories and allusions about jade and jadeite? Urgent!

Professor Wang Shu has made great achievements in mineralogy and gemology. He is the author of Opaque Mineral Crystal Optics, Polarizing Microscope and Microphotography, The Secret of Diamonds, Crystal Gemstones, How to Identify Jewelry and Jade, Jewelry Gold Jewelry, Identification of Gemstones, Jewelry Selection Knowledge, Stories of Tang Poetry and Stories of Song Poetry.

Chen Ziang, a famous poet in the Tang Dynasty, wrote a group of 38 poems about feelings, among which the 23rd poem wrote: "The jade nest is in the South China Sea, with a forest of male and female pearls, beautiful jewels and gorgeous tapestries." Jade birds nest on the coast of the South China Sea (now southeast Guangxi), both male and female, and live in dense forests. Jewelry made of beautiful jade feathers is dazzling, and bedding decorated with jade feathers is colorful. It can be seen that in the Tang Dynasty more than 1000 years ago, the jade bird feather was a precious raw material for jewelry.

In Volume 15 of Ji Xiaolan's famous work Reading Notes of Wei Caotang, there is such a record: "When I was young, Yunnan jade was not jade at that time, but it was as yellow as Lantian, and it was famous for its jade. Today, it is considered rare, and the price is much higher than the real jade. " Ji Xiaolan was born in 1724 and died in 1805. It can be considered that when he was young, it was 1735, that is, when Emperor Qianlong ascended the throne. The fifteenth volume of Notes of Yuewei Caotang was written in the Qianlong period (that is, in the fifty-eighth year of Qianlong, AD 1793). So when Ji Xiaolan was young more than 260 years ago, people didn't think jadeite was real jade, but yellow-green serpentine marble produced in Lantian, Shaanxi, which was not precious at all. When Ji Xiaolan wrote this book about 60 years later, that is, about 200 years ago, the advantages of jadeite have been recognized by the general public, so it has become a precious jade with a price much higher than that of Hetian jade. Therefore, it is precisely during the sixty years of Qianlong in the Qing Dynasty that the status of jade and jadeite has undergone fundamental changes. Since then, no one has ever used the feathers of this "jade" bird as jewelry. The word jade has become a noun, referring to a precious jade.

During the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty, officials went to Yongchang (now Baoshan, Yunnan) to buy precious stones, and were introduced to see high-grade jadeite, which was considered much more beautiful than the traditional jadeite and Hetian jade in China. So they chose high-grade jade to carve jade for Emperor Qianlong, and Qianlong greatly appreciated it, thinking that it surpassed Hetian jade, which was regarded as a treasure in the past, and named it "Imperial Jade", which is also the origin of today's highest quality jade called Imperial Jade. At that time, Qianlong ordered to buy a large number of high-grade jade articles to make jade articles. Driven by the imperial court, the price of jade rose rapidly, which is exactly what Ji Xiaolan described in Yuewei Caotang Notes.

The jadeite mine in Myanmar is located in the Lu Wu River basin in the northwest. From Wacheng, the second largest city in Myanmar, to the north along the railway, it is about100km west of Meng Gong, and it reaches Pagan, a famous jadeite producing area along the Lu Wu River in savage area (see right). Pagan has a permanent population of about 80,000, but the floating population is as high as180,000, among which Chinese are the majority, as well as Burmese, Thais, Pakistanis and Indians. It's all about jade trading. The traffic in Pagan is still inconvenient, the road conditions are poor, the local natural environment is hot and humid, and the living conditions are very difficult.

From the late Ming Dynasty to the middle of the 20th century, during the 300-odd years when jadeite was used, people chose the sites to produce more high-quality jadeite, but neglected the sites that mainly produced ordinary jadeite materials. Even in the selected field, the jadeite produced is not so good, and the quality is more general. At the beginning, people had high requirements for the selection of jadeite raw materials, and they must have a (water) color, otherwise they would be thrown away as waste stones or used as building materials. During this period, the price of high-quality green materials was also very low, and many famous good materials and big materials were produced in history. For example, the jadeite jade collected by Yin Wenda, a Tengchong person in the early Qing Dynasty, is very big and sawed into thin slices to make hanging square headlights; Duan Jiayu in the middle of Qing Dynasty, Ma Jiayu of "Ma Bu Yun" family and Jiayu Wang of Wang Xiangxian's family in Guangxu period of Qing Dynasty made more than 500 pairs of jade bracelets, each pair can be worth 6.5438+0 million RMB at today's price. Wang Zhenkun's "Hui Ka Yu" in Taiping Street weighed several tons and was cut into eight pieces with a diameter of more than 80 cm, seven of which were worth millions of silver dollars. Since then, many high-quality giant jadeites have appeared one after another, such as "Xiaojiayu" and "Guan". Now the old mines have dried up, and good materials are extremely scarce. And the size is not big, but the price is surprisingly high. In 2000, a high-quality jadeite raw material weighing only 7.5 kilograms was produced in a mine in the riverbed of Lu Wu, and sold in Yangon, the capital of Myanmar, for a sky-high price of US$ 24 million.