Red jade: meaning and where the color comes from

The red jade meaning is the meaning of the color red in Chinese culture: good fortune, joy and celebration, along with a traditional belief that red keeps evil away. The stone behind the name is almost always jadeite stained by iron oxide, called hong fei (红翡) in Chinese. The meaning is symbolism. Nothing in the stone has been shown to bring luck or protect anyone.

What red jade means

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, in its account of red in Chinese art, links the color with fire, the sun, the heart and the south. Red stands for good fortune, happiness, celebration, fertility and prosperity, and it is believed to repel evil, which is why it is the color of lanterns, wedding dresses and gift envelopes. Red jade is given the same meaning, on top of what jadeite in general is taken to symbolize: prosperity, success and good luck, according to GIA.

Two combinations have names of their own:

• Red and green in one piece is shuang xi (双喜), “double happiness”.
• Red, green and lavender together is fu lu shou (福禄寿), after the three star gods of good fortune, prosperity and longevity.

How these ideas fit into the wider tradition is covered in what jade represents in Chinese culture.

What a red jade stone really looks like

Most jadeite sold as red is orange-red or brownish red. A pure, strong red is rare, and dealers say red is harder to find than yellow. GIA lists reddish orange among the natural colors of jadeite and notes that orange to reddish jade is popular, especially when it is not brownish.

The color is also half of jadeite’s Chinese name. In fei cui (翡翠), fei refers to the red-to-yellow color and cui to the green, as in the trade saying that red is fei and green is cui.

Where the color comes from

Red is not part of the jadeite crystals. According to the gemologist Richard Hughes and his co-authors in Gems & Gemology, the red to orange-brown color comes from hydrous iron oxides, rust-type minerals, staining the boundaries between the grains. It is found only in boulders recovered from iron-rich soil, where the porous skin of the boulder has soaked up the stain.

Dealers call this a secondary color. It arrived after the jade had formed, when weathering produced iron minerals that seeped inward along the gaps between crystals. In coarse-grained stone the red forms a web around pale grains. In fine-grained stone it looks even. Yellow jadeite is colored by the same staining.

Where the red sits in the stone

The stain sits in the layer just under the weathered rind, which dealers call the mist layer, wu ceng (雾层). It rarely goes deep. A cut piece therefore often shows a cap of red over white or green, and carvers tend to use the red as an accent. How rind and interior relate is explained in raw jade.

Because the layer is thin, a thick, evenly red bead or a fully red bangle is uncommon in natural material. Dealers treat large, uniformly red pieces as either exceptional or heated.

Heated red jade

What is done

Pale yellow, brown or dull red jadeite is heated so that its iron minerals oxidize further and the color turns a deeper orange-red. The chemistry is not special to jade: on heating to roughly 350 °C (about 660 °F), the yellow-brown iron mineral goethite loses water and becomes red hematite, a change described in Gems & Gemology for other heated gems. Hughes and his co-authors record that the iron stain in jadeite skin is sometimes intensified with heat, and GIA lists heat among the treatments applied to jade.

How it is sold

The Chinese trade and its national standard class the heating of red and yellow jadeite as an accepted “optimization”. Heated pieces are still sold and certified as natural A jadeite, the same grade as untouched stone (see type A, B and C jade). An A certificate therefore does not tell you the red is unheated. If natural color matters to you, ask the seller that question in those words.

What dealers look for

	Natural red	Heated red
Color	Deeper and lighter zones	Very even and flat, with no gradation
Edge of the color	Passes gradually into the uncolored part	Tends to cover the whole piece
Look of the stone	Keeps its translucency	Dry, with reduced translucency
Surface under magnification	Ordinary polished surface	Fine pits or crazing

These are signs, not proof. Overheating also does real damage: the stone dries out, becomes more brittle and can crack.

Why a laboratory often cannot be sure

Heating adds no foreign material and does not break down the structure the way acid bleaching does, so instruments have little to detect. Dealers say laboratories judge heated red jadeite largely by eye and experience, and that some certificates decline to state the origin of the color.

What the trade does not agree on

People who handle this material every day give opposite answers to two questions.

• How much is heated. Some dealers say most of the red and yellow jadeite on the market has been heated. Others say it is far less than buyers assume, because most attempts at heating fail.
• What heated stone is worth. Some put it at a small fraction of natural color. Others say a well-heated piece can look better than a natural one and is not cheap.

No reliable figure exists for either. The practical position is that heating is common, is disclosed unevenly, and is reason enough to ask before paying a premium for red.

Is there red nephrite?

Nephrite, the other true jade, has no true red class. What it shows is brown, known as sugar color, tang (糖), and a red-brown skin on river pebbles, which dealers describe as red skin over white or green flesh. The cause is related: analysis of pebbles from Hetian in Xinjiang has identified goethite and hematite, the same iron minerals, in the red and yellow skin. A stone sold as solid red nephrite deserves a closer look.

Value, dye and imitations

Green is the most desirable jadeite color and lavender the next; red and orange are popular but rank below them, and a clean orange-red is worth more than brownish tones. Orange-red cabochons are nonetheless much sought-after in China. The full ranking is in jade value by color.

Dye is a separate matter from heat. Orange-brown is one of the colors produced by dyeing pale jadeite, and the dye gathers in cracks and along grain boundaries. Dyed stone is graded C, not A. GIA also notes that the word jade has often been applied to look-alike stones, so something sold as red jade may be neither jadeite nor nephrite.

Home checks narrow things down. For a piece of any real value, a gemological laboratory report is what settles whether the stone is jadeite and whether it has been dyed or filled, with the limit already noted: on heating, even a laboratory may not commit. The other colors and their causes are in every color of jade.