Raw jade: what it looks like and how it is sold

Raw jade rarely looks green. It usually turns up as a rounded boulder or pebble with a dull weathered skin, brown, yellow, gray or black, and to an untrained eye it is an ordinary rock that happens to be heavier and smoother than its neighbors. Neither buyer nor seller knows the quality inside until the stone is cut, and that uncertainty shapes the whole trade in rough jade.

What raw jadeite looks like

All jadeite rough carries a weathering skin, whether it comes from Myanmar or Guatemala, as GIA noted in 2024. Covered this way, a jade stone in the rock looks like any other river boulder.

Size varies enormously. In Myanmar most jadeite boulders weigh under 1 kg (2.2 lb), though some reach 300 kg (660 lb), according to the field account in Gems & Gemology. Only a tiny fraction of the boulders recovered contain jewelry-quality material.

The skin sometimes gives hints. Places where a blow or a thin patch of skin exposes the color underneath are called show points, and the Chinese name is songhua (松花), “pine flowers”. Wetting the stone makes the show points of bright green jadeite stand out.

A cut face tells more. On a freshly sawn, unpolished surface you can see tiny glinting flashes where the saw has crossed individual crystal grains. Chinese dealers call these fly wings, cangying chi (苍蝇翅), and the bigger the flashes, the coarser the grain.

What raw nephrite looks like

Raw nephrite comes in two main forms, and the Chinese trade has a name for each.

Form	Chinese term	Where it comes from	What it looks like
Mountain material	shanliao (山料)	Quarried from the primary deposit	Angular blocks with no skin
Seed material	ziliao (籽料)	Carried and tumbled by rivers	Rounded pebbles and boulders, often with a brown or yellow iron-stained skin

Seed material ranges from small pebbles to very large boulders. Sound, unfractured nephrite resists erosion, so a river tends to destroy cracked material and leave the solid cores. The same pattern holds in the United States: the Wyoming State Geological Survey says most of the state’s high-quality nephrite has come from stream-deposited material, and that only about 10 percent of most nephrite deposits is gem quality. The stone itself is described in nephrite jade.

How miners spot jade in rock

Miners in Myanmar pick jadeite out from other boulders by a handful of signs recorded in Gems & Gemology: it rings more when struck with a hoe or hammer, feels heavier than the rocks around it (its specific gravity is about 3.34), is smoother than most boulders and lacks the sparkle of mica or quartz. Divers say it feels slightly sticky to wet hands and feet. In the field, the Wyoming survey says, nephrite is told from look-alikes by its lack of granular structure, its splintery fracture and its resistance to a knife, which will often scratch serpentinite. None of this is proof, and the Wyoming survey notes that positive identification often needs laboratory tests. The step-by-step checks are in how to identify raw jade in a rock.

How rough jade is sold

Since the skin hides the stone, sellers and buyers have developed ways of peeking.

Windows. A small area of skin is cut away to show the material beneath. A window that is transparent and vividly colored can at least double the asking price, the Gems & Gemology authors report, yet the exposed spot may reveal nothing about the rest of the interior.

Flashlights. Buyers press a strong flashlight against the skin or the window and watch how far the light travels and what color comes back. GIA observed Guatemalan rough being sold this way and noted that it mirrors practice at the Myanmar jadeite auctions.

Official sales. In Myanmar, jade lots are sold at government gem emporiums and special sales, organized three times a year by the state-owned Myanma Gems Enterprise, as the US Treasury described it in 2021.

Border markets. Much rough is traded across the China-Myanmar border, with Ruili in Yunnan province as the main hub. Some top stones go to public auction in Myanmar or by sea to Hong Kong and Guangzhou for cutting. The mines and trade routes are covered in Burmese jade.

Resale of half-opened stones. An opened stone is easier to price. Experienced traders often scrape or cut a little and then sell the partly opened stone to the next buyer, passing the remaining risk along, as The World of Chinese describes.

Stone gambling: why buying uncut jade is a bet

Buying uncut jadeite is known in China as dushi (赌石), “stone gambling”. The trade’s own sayings describe the odds. One holds that even an immortal cannot judge an inch of jade. Another is shi du jiu shu (十赌九输), “ten bets, nine losses”. A collector quoted by The World of Chinese put it the same way: nine out of ten laymen who gamble on uncut stones lose.

The swings run in both directions. Sixth Tone reports an 18 kg (40 lb) rough jadeite stone that sold in 2019 for about US$12.4 million and was appraised after cutting at one twentieth of that, and a buyer whose inexpensive stone turned out to be worth 400 times what he paid.

A flashlight does not remove the risk. Dealers caution that a stone which lights up brightly is not necessarily good: coarse, loosely packed jadeite lets a lot of light through but lacks the icy clarity of fine material. A face that looks clean and translucent may have cracks or cloudy patches, which the trade calls cotton, mian (棉), just behind it or on the other side of the stone.

Dealers speak of a stone gambling up, du zhang (赌涨), or gambling down, du kua (赌垮), and the result follows the stone into the shop. Pieces cut from a boulder that turned out well can be sold more cheaply than identical-looking pieces from one the cutter overpaid for. That is one reason similar finished jadeite carries very different price tags.

Fakes and tricks in rough jade

• Manufactured river pebbles. GIA reports that white nephrite artificially polished into pebble shapes and partly dyed brown-orange is often seen in China, imitating the skinned pebbles of mutton fat jade. Chinese dealers describe quarried material being tumbled in drums and its skin dyed or baked on.
• Filled cavities. GIA has documented cavities in nephrite filled and colored to mimic natural skin.
• Doctored jadeite boulders. Sixth Tone notes that fakes go back decades and that some crude 1990s examples were filled with green toothpaste.
• Wrong origin. Dealers say Guatemalan jadeite, which sells for less in the Chinese market, is sometimes passed off as Burmese.
• Staged livestreams. According to Sixth Tone, livestream sellers have staged discovery stories or swapped the finished goods promised from a customer’s stone.

From rough to jewelry

Cutters value a boulder first for the bangles it can yield, then for pendants, beads and cabochons from what is left. A crack through the bangle-sized area can wipe out most of a boulder’s value, and one stone produces pieces of quite different quality.

The poorest jadeite rough goes another way. It is soaked in strong acid to remove stains, which leaves the stone porous and fragile, and then filled with resin. The result is type B jade, explained in type A, B and C jade.

If you are thinking of buying raw jade

Buying rough is a bet, not a bargain. The trade’s own sayings admit that nobody, however experienced, can see inside a stone.

A boulder with a promising window is priced on the window, and the window may say nothing about the rest of the stone. Online, you cannot even shine your own light on it. If what you want is jade to wear or keep, buy a finished piece: its color, translucency and cracks are there to be seen. Looking narrows things down, and a report from a gemological laboratory settles whether the piece is natural, untreated jade.