Types of jade

There are two types of jade: jadeite and nephrite. GIA treats jade as a generic term for those two materials and notes that, under certain conditions, green omphacite is now included as well. Every other “type” you will meet on a tag or in a shop is one of two things: a way of sorting jadeite or nephrite by texture, color, treatment or origin, or a different stone borrowing the name.

The two types of jade stone: jadeite and nephrite

Jadeite and nephrite are unrelated minerals that happen to look and behave alike. Both are metamorphic rocks built of tiny interlocking crystals, which is why both are so hard to break. They were treated as one stone until 1863, when the French mineralogist Alexis Damour showed that a Burmese jade and a Chinese jade carving were different minerals.

	Jadeite	Nephrite
Mineral	Sodium aluminum silicate, pyroxene group	Calcium magnesium iron silicate, amphibole group
Mohs hardness	6.5 to 7	6 to 6.5
Specific gravity	About 3.34, so it feels heavier	About 2.95
Luster	Glassier, takes a higher polish	Soft, greasy to waxy
Colors	Green, yellow, reddish orange, white, gray, black, brown, lavender; often uneven	Light to dark green, yellow, brown, black, gray, white; more muted
Main sources	Northern Myanmar; also Guatemala, Japan, Russia	China, Russia, South Korea, Canada, United States, New Zealand
Chinese name	feicui (翡翠)	Hetian yu (和田玉)
Price ceiling	Among the highest of any gem	Lower in general; size adds less

The numbers are GIA’s reference values. The full comparison is in jadeite vs nephrite. What the hardness figures mean for scratching and breaking is in jade hardness.

Types of jadeite: how the trade grades zhong and shui

Chinese dealers grade the body of a jadeite piece by two linked qualities. Zhong (种) is the crystal structure: how fine the grains are and how tightly they are packed. Shui (水), literally “water”, is the translucency that results. The two are usually quoted together as zhongshui. The trade names four main grades.

Grade	Chinese name	What it looks like	Where it sits in value
Bean	dou zhong (豆种)	Coarse grains visible to the naked eye; opaque; looks like ordinary stone	Bottom
Glutinous	nuo zhong (糯种)	Fine-grained and slightly translucent, likened to rice soup or a boiled rice dumpling	Middle
Ice	bing zhong (冰种)	Semi-transparent, like an ice cube	High
Glass	boli zhong (玻璃种)	Close to fully transparent, with no visible grain	Top, and very rare

Dealers split these further, and this is where their ladders stop matching. A common version climbs from fine glutinous (xi nuo, 细糯) through “melted” glutinous (nuo hua, 糯化) and glutinous-ice (nuo bing, 糯冰, a half-and-half grade) to true ice (zheng bing, 正冰), high ice (gao bing, 高冰) and glass. Some dealers add a “small ice” step below true ice and an “ice-glass” step above high ice. No version is official.

These names are trade vocabulary, not laboratory grades. Dealers say there is no written rule for where one grade ends and the next begins, that neighboring grades can only be told apart by putting stones side by side, and that sellers, livestream sellers in particular, routinely call a stone one or several grades higher than it is. A piece that lets light through is not automatically ice type. Some dealers also keep zhong and zhongshui apart, because structure is fixed while the translucency you see shifts with thickness, lighting and body color.

Tightly packed, fine-grained jadeite is called old (zhong lao, 种老): it takes a brighter polish and is more translucent and stable. Loose, coarse-grained jadeite is tender (zhong nen, 种嫩): it looks dry and chalky and polishes unevenly. GIA describes texture in English as fine, medium or coarse, sometimes called old mine, relatively old mine and new mine.

A trade saying has it that insiders look at zhong and outsiders look at color. The point is that color only carries real value when it sits in fine, translucent material.

Types of jade by color

Jadeite has its own color words: cui (翠) is green, fei (翡) is red to yellow-brown, chun (春) is lavender, and mo cui (墨翠) is jadeite that looks black in the hand but shows green with a strong light behind it. At the top is imperial jade, which GIA defines as the finest quality of jadeite: almost transparent, with a vibrant emerald-green color. Emerald itself is a different and harder stone, as jade vs emerald explains. For every color and its cause, see jade colors.

Types of nephrite

Chinese dealers sort nephrite mainly by color: white (baiyu, 白玉), greenish white (qingbai yu, 青白玉), gray-green (qingyu, 青玉, the most abundant), spinach green (biyu, 碧玉), yellow (huangyu, 黄玉, rare), brown “sugar” jade (tangyu, 糖玉) and black (moyu, 墨玉). In the Chinese market white sits at the top. A Gems & Gemology study describes the best Xinjiang nephrite as white with a greasy luster, the material the trade calls mutton fat jade.

Nephrite is also sorted by how it was found:

• Mountain material (shanliao, 山料) is quarried from the primary deposit and comes out as angular blocks with no skin.
• Seed material (ziliao, 籽料) broke off, was carried down rivers and tumbled into rounded pebbles and boulders, often with an iron-stained skin.
• Mountain-stream material (shan liu shui, 山流水) sits between them: partly rounded pieces that traveled only a short way.

What these look like before cutting is covered in raw jade.

Two points catch out newcomers. Translucency is judged in the opposite direction from jadeite: nephrite buyers prize an oily, dense look, and very translucent material has traditionally been marked down. And “Hetian jade” on a Chinese certificate is a mineral name, not an origin: any tremolite nephrite that meets the national standard gets it, wherever it was mined. Both are explained in nephrite jade.

Types by treatment and by origin

The letters A, B and C describe what has been done to a stone (nothing, bleaching and filling, or dyeing), which is a separate question from what type of jade it is: see type A, B and C jade.

Origin labels are simpler. The mines of northern Myanmar are the principal source of top-grade jadeite, which is why Burmese jade is treated as the benchmark. Nephrite is mined far more widely, from Xinjiang and Russia to British Columbia, Wyoming and New Zealand, where it is called pounamu or greenstone.

Stones called jade that are not jade

The Chinese word yu (玉) is broader than the English word jade. Chinese tradition speaks of four famous jades: Hetian jade, Xiuyan jade (岫岩玉), Lantian jade (蓝田玉) and Dushan jade (独山玉). In everyday speech all of them are yu. Many dealers, though, keep the narrow sense of yu for nephrite and jadeite and class the rest as yushi (玉石), “jade stones”. A Chinese name ending in yu does not mean the stone is jade in the gemological sense.

English has its own misnomers. Geology.com lists these among others:

Trade name	What it is
Transvaal jade	Green grossular garnet
Mexican jade	Dyed calcite or travertine
Indian jade	Aventurine quartz
Manchurian jade	Soapstone

Common look-alikes include serpentine, chalcedony, chrysoprase, vesuvianite and hydrogrossular garnet. The US Federal Trade Commission’s jewelry guides treat incorrect variety names as potentially deceptive. In the Chinese market, the usual stand-ins for white nephrite are quartzite and white marble, the latter sold as “Afghan jade”.

Types of jade and value

Only a few of these labels move the price much. The first is jadeite versus nephrite: GIA notes that jadeite commands some of the highest prices of any gem. Within jadeite, GIA ranks the value factors as color, then transparency, then texture, the same ground the zhong and shui grades cover. Treatment is the third, because bleached or dyed jade sells for far less than untreated jade. How these combine is laid out in why jade is expensive.

A grade name or an origin on a tag is a seller’s opinion. For a piece of real value, looking and handling narrow things down, and a gemological laboratory report settles which type it is.

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