Gold, in its glorious spectrum of metallic hues, has the sort of status that transcends time and place. King Midas was obsessed with it, the Conquistadors pillaged South America in search of El Dorado and Egyptian Pharaohs were entombed with heaps of it. But there’s a very different type of gold, that, in lands east of the Himalayas, trumps them all – the green kind.
This ‘green gold’ of course, is jade, the most valuable semi-precious stone on earth. In East Asia, where the cult of jade is most potent, the folklore and superstitions attached to it are rife. Because of its toughness and translucency, the ancient Chinese associated jade with the essence of the human soul, spawning romantic myths about its creation. One tale says it is crystallised moonlight; another claims it is created by thunder and captures the energy of the skies, which earned it the moniker, ‘The Stone of Heaven’. All over East Asia, it is still widely believed that jade brings luck and protection to the wearer. When a piece of jade jewellery breaks, it’s said that the stone’s ‘good’ energy has been spent and its destruction has saved the owner from a pending catastrophe.
‘Jade’ itself is an umbrella term that refers to two distinct mineral stones: nephrite and jadeite. Nephrite has been mined for millennia and was what Han Chinese emperors were dressed in for burial. These jade burial suits, sewn together from thousands of pieces of nephrite, were believed to act like a kind of immortal armour, preserving the body so it could be reunited with the soul, or ‘po’ in the afterlife. Jadeite, which was only mined in earnest from the 18th century and largely comes from Burma, is the more sought after, owing to its hypnotic luminosity and rich array of shades, ranging from icy white to lavender, lava red and the most desired – Imperial Green – with its bright emerald hue and water-like transparency.
While nephrite burial suits have been left to languish in museums, jadeite bangles are still highly coveted. Women sometimes save their entire lives to purchase their dream bangle; it is believed the right one can determine a woman’s fate. These bracelets, often antique in origin and of the highest grade stone, change hands for tens of thousands, or in some cases, millions. The most highly valued to date is the ‘Circle of Heaven’ bangle, which has a top-end estimate of $12.75 million.
In much the way a London postcode denotes a certain cache, how you wore jade bracelets signposted your status. Bangles worn on the left wrist signified a working woman; on the right, a lady of leisure who had the staff to save her from the menial labour that could crack a treasured wristlet. Bangles on both wrists signalled that life had turned out pretty sweet for you.
The spiritual and material values attached to jade have led to prolific collecting of the stone over the years. The Qianlong Emperor who reigned between 1736 to 1795, amassed a hoard of more than 30,000 jade objects. In the 20th century, Kung Hsiang-hsi – a powerful Chinese diplomat and 75th-generation descendant of Confucius – built up a fabled collection of jade jewellery with his wife, which sold at Christie’s in Hong Kong for $14.6 million in June 2015, an average of seven times its estimate.
In the West, jade hasn’t generated quite the same fervour, but collectors of prize specimens aren’t unheard of. Ill-fated American heiress Barbara Hutton treasured her so-called ‘Hutton-Mdivani’ necklace, a gift from her father on the first of a string of marriages. Consisting of 16, perfectly uniform Imperial Green jadeite beads, it has a bespoke bejewelled clasp designed by Cartier in 1933, in the High Deco codes of the time. Eventually, it found its way to the saleroom of Sotheby’s Hong Kong, where it made a cool $27.4 million in 2014, making it the most valuable jade necklace in the world.
John Rigas, Chairman of Asprey – one the leading purveyors of luxury objets d’art in history – has been a keen collector of jade for a decade. It was his personal interest in the material that was the catalyst for Asprey’s Imperial Jadeite collection, which is now on display in its new boutique, in The Peninsula London. “It’s beautiful to look at, yes, but it’s also beautiful to touch… it’s the most tactile mineral there is. It adjusts to your body temperature right away, which makes it very comfortable to wear,” explains Rigas.
The assortment of carved objects, jewellery and roughs is largely made from museum-grade Imperial Green jadeite, which commands a premium and is the culmination of over ten years of careful sourcing and curation. Highlights include bangles, a polished brooch, an abacus and a teapot, hand-carved from a solid block of jadeite. Also significant are a pair of walnut carvings, which have ties to traditional Chinese medicine. These palm-sized orbs would be used to exercise the hands, stimulating blood flow, which was supposedly beneficial for warding off ailments.
It can be difficult to know where to begin with collecting jade, if you’re, well, a bit green on the subject. The most general advice is to look at the level of transparency and lustre of the stone. “Just as diamonds sparkle, jadeite is supposed to gleam,” says Ronny Hsu, head of sale at Christie’s Asia’s jewellery department. But this isn’t the sole yardstick, as the grading method is complex and often ends up being more of an art than a science. “When it comes to appraising fine quality jadeite jewellery, there is no standard scale of criteria. Although there are metrics to describe desirable attributes of the stone – translucency, clarity, inclusions, shape, size, hue and saturation,” adds Hsu.
In truth, it’s challenging for even a seasoned expert to always establish the true quality of jade with the naked eye; testing is needed, particularly given the rife practice over the years of chemically treating stones to fake the most desired hues and qualities. “Once you get to higher investment levels, you really have to have proper certification and analysis, like you’re buying a very expensive diamond,” says Rigas. To help provide this clarity, Asprey has partnered with the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Oxford, which provides a 30-page mineralogical analysis report for all its jadeite objects – an industry first. “When we started studying the history of the mineral, we realised how the certification methods were often unreliable and subjective. The purpose of [this collaboration] is to establish a standardised and uniform process for the certification and traceability of jadeite,” says Rigas.
Beyond the lab coats and logic of science, though, curating your own jade collection is all in the feeling, which Rigas knows all too well. “You take something that is already an established cultural artefact that has its own sort of emotional content, and then you infuse it with the incremental emotion that jadeite brings – the effect is really magical.” With such sentiments, your own cache is sure to make others just a little green with envy.
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