Why is jade so expensive, and is it really rare?

Most jade is not expensive. The jade that is, fine untreated jadeite, costs what it does for five reasons: gem-quality material is a tiny fraction of what is mined, the principal source is one district in northern Myanmar, every boulder is bought as a gamble, the most wanted forms waste most of the rough, and demand in China is intense. In short, the reason jade is so expensive is that a small part of it is very scarce and very much wanted. The rest is ordinary stone.

Is jade rare?

A flat yes or no is wrong either way, because jade is two materials and each comes in many grades.

Material	How rare	Why
Nephrite	Fairly common	British Columbia alone sells about 800 to 1,200 tonnes on the world market each year
Jadeite rock	Geologically uncommon	It forms only under unusual conditions, and few deposits exist
Gem-quality jadeite	Rare	Only a tiny fraction of the boulders recovered contain jewelry-quality material
Imperial green and glass-grade jadeite	Very rare	These are the scarcest grades even within gem-quality material

The nephrite tonnage comes from the government of British Columbia. The jadeite rows rest on the Gems & Gemology study of Burmese jade by Richard Hughes and colleagues, which notes that high prices apply only to the small jewelry-quality fraction. No reliable source gives a percentage for that fraction. The difference between the two materials is explained in jadeite versus nephrite.

Why there are so few jadeite deposits

Jadeite rock crystallizes from watery fluids rising through serpentinized rock, at relatively high pressure and low temperature, above a plate that is being pushed under another. In Myanmar that happened where the Indian plate was driven under Asia as the Himalayas were built.

Myanmar’s mines, around Hpakan in Kachin State in the north of the country, are the world’s principal source of fine jadeite. Jadeite also occurs in Guatemala, Japan, Russia and California, but none of these is a significant source of top-grade gem material. Burmese jade has more on the source.

From boulder to bangle: where the cost builds up

Rough that is bought blind

Most Burmese jadeite is recovered as boulders from a conglomerate of old river deposits, and output is erratic: according to the Gems & Gemology account, miners may find twenty or thirty pieces one day and none for days afterwards.

A jadeite boulder has a weathered skin that hides the interior. Traders judge it from small polished windows, from the skin itself and with a penlight, and buying one remains a gamble. The Gems & Gemology authors call this “luck, joss, fortune, the very essence of the jade business”. Raw jade describes how rough is read and sold.

That gamble is passed into finished prices. Dealers explain that someone who paid bangle prices for a boulder that turns out to be cracked must recover the money from the smaller pieces, while someone whose boulder turned out better than expected can sell cheaper. This is a main reason two similar-looking pieces carry different prices.

Cutting that wastes most of the stone

Cracks are common in rough, and they dictate what can be cut. A bangle needs a large crack-free block. A matched bead strand needs a large volume of even color. The forms that waste the most rough are therefore the most expensive, and GIA notes that one-piece bangles cost more than hinged ones because of the greater weight loss. Pieces from the same boulder are not equal either: the trade separates the best cuts from the leftovers, and prices within one batch can differ many times over.

The top grades are rare within the rare

Imperial jade combines a vivid chromium green with near transparency and very fine texture, and the International Gem Society describes it as very rare. Glass-grade texture is likewise scarce, which is why even colorless glass-grade jadeite is costly. See imperial jade for what qualifies.

Skilled carving

A good carver works around flaws and uses the natural color of the stone in the design, and dealers say hand carving by a known workshop costs far more than machine carving. For carvings, design and workmanship drive the value.

Demand: two centuries of Chinese taste

China is the strongest market for jadeite. A regular trade route for jadeite from Burma to China existed by 1798, after the Qianlong emperor’s reign brought the mines within reach, and the taste of the Qing court, and later of the Empress Dowager Cixi, made green jadeite a prestige material.

The trade is large. The advocacy group Global Witness estimated the value of Myanmar’s jade production in 2014 at up to $31 billion, well above the roughly $12 billion indicated by Chinese import data. Both are estimates, the first an upper estimate from a campaigning organization, and neither is an audited figure. The same report documents the conflict and the mining conditions around Hpakan.

This is also a market with no price list. Dealers price from the last comparable sale and quote a range, the same piece can be offered at very different prices, and each bold purchase at a higher price becomes the reference for the next sale.

Supply rules and the question of scarcity

Trade rules have restricted supply to the United States more than once. The Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE Act of 2008 banned US imports of jadeite from Myanmar, even if it had been cut and exported from another country, and GIA records that the ban was lifted in 2016. On 8 April 2021 the US Treasury sanctioned Myanma Gems Enterprise, the state body that licenses mining and markets jade.

Dealers in the Chinese trade say good rough has become harder to get. In their account, mining is more mechanized and produces more tonnage but not more top-quality stone, mines and exports are more tightly controlled, and rough now often costs more than the finished pieces it used to yield. This is a view from sellers, who have an interest in saying so, and the same trade also describes prices softening for ordinary expensive pieces when the market is weak. Scarce rough explains why fine jade costs a lot. It does not mean prices only move one way.

Is real jade expensive?

Being real does not make a jade piece expensive. Being fine does. Most natural jadeite on the market is coarse, opaque material, and untreated bangles of that grade sell very cheaply.

Three kinds of jade are cheap for a reason:

• Treated jade. One industry estimate, from a US jade wholesaler and testing service, puts bleached and polymer-filled B jade at roughly 5% to 10% of the value of the equivalent untreated piece, and dyed jade at a few dollars.
• Low-grade natural jadeite, as above.
• Guatemalan jadeite, which dealers say has entered the market in quantity and sells for much less than Burmese material as a whole.

Whether an expensive-looking piece is untreated cannot be settled by looking at it. Home checks narrow things down, and a gemological laboratory report settles it.

At the other end, this is what the market has paid:

Piece	Sale	Price
Hutton-Mdivani necklace, 27 imperial green jadeite beads	Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 7 April 2014	$27.44 million
Imperial white nephrite seal of the Qianlong emperor	Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 22 April 2021	about $18.8 million
Single jadeite bangle	Sotheby’s Hong Kong, April 2021	$3.92 million
Highly translucent, untreated multi-color Burmese jadeite bangle	Bonhams Los Angeles, 16 May 2018	$5,625 including premium

The last row is the useful comparison: a good, untreated, translucent bangle at a price in the thousands. What sets a price is covered in how much jade is worth.

The nephrite side

Nephrite is not rare, and its price by weight shows it. British Columbia’s best (AAA) rough averaged $600 to $1,000 per kilogram (2.2 lb) in 2016, about 60 cents to $1 per gram, and ordinary grades are far cheaper. The release does not state the currency, which is presumably Canadian dollars.

The exception is fine white material. GIA researchers note that white mutton fat nephrite from Xinjiang has kept the highest price of any nephrite in the Chinese market, and that nephrite from other places has been misrepresented as Xinjiang material to fetch higher prices. Top white nephrite now competes in price with the finest imperial jadeite.