The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade - Softcover

Adrian Levy; Scott-Clark, Cathy

4.06

141 ratings by Goodreads

9780753813294: The Stone of Heaven: The Secret History of Imperial Green Jade

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753813297 ISBN 13: 9780753813294

Publisher: Phoenix, 2002

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Diamonds, sapphires and rubies are commonly thought to be the world's most valuable gemstones but there is another that is even more precious. It is Imperial Green Jade, or jadeite. The stone's prestige derives from its intense beauty and extraordinary scarcity. Almost all of the world's jadeite comes from one place: a valley in the shadow of the Himalayas, buried deep in the bedrock of the most remote mining area in the world. Since its discovery nearly 2,000 years ago, Imperial Green Jade has been worshipped, ingested and traded. Inspired by legends of a gemstone 'that glowed as if lit by a hidden flame', armies have waged wars to seize its source, First Ladies have flaunted it and Hollywood stars have spent fortunes on pieces stolen from the tombs of Chinese Emperors. Royal collectors believed it could make them immortal. Warlords ground it into powder and drunk it as an elixir. Revolutionaries exploited it to fund coups and finance wars. For European explorers, it was legendary. Those who returned from Burma in the fifteenth century came with stories of a kingdom built entirely from the green stone, a place they called the Lost Valley of Capelan. Today foreigners are barred from the place in northern Burma known as 'Jadeland', where thousands of soldiers guard the dictatorship's treasures. In order to be the first Europeans ever to get there, Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark had to persuade Rangoon's generals to escort them. This book reveals how they did so and in its final chapters takes the reader on a terrifying journey to the Lost Valley of Capelan. What they discovered was jadeite's biggest secret: a human disaster of biblical proportions.

The Stone of Heaven brilliantly combines original historical research, travelogue and investigative journalism to relate for the first time this hidden history. It is the story of a gem that changed the lives of all who owned it and shaped the destiny of nations that sought to control its source.

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Review:

The Stone of Heaven: the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark is one of those remarkable travel-cum-history books that manages to combine both glamour and mystery with the exposure of moral squalor and appalling political corruption. These are the things that gold, silver, diamonds have generated throughout history--and so too, it seems, has imperial green jade. The facts about the "stone of heaven" sound more like the wildest fictions of swashbuckling storytellers like Rider Haggard, or perhaps even Wilbur Smith. It is by far the most valuable stone in the world (diamonds are positively cheap compared to this stuff), and in its purest form, it derives from only one source: a remote mine in a valley in the very shadow of the Himalayas. The authors take us competently through the history of green jade, brought to life most entertainingly of all in the 18th-century skirmishes between the British and the Chinese--in terms of wiliness and cunning, a fine match for each other. They give us some great "well, would you believe it?" facts (one Chinese Emperor wrote more than 800 poems to his beloved jade collection). But the book really ignites towards the end, and becomes something very different, when Levy and Scott-Clark finally reach the world's only jade mine, now in Burma. Here there are facts to be learned that truly beggar belief. The mines are worked by around one million men, women and children. They are paid in government-supplied heroin. Needles are shared between around 800 people at a time. 99.9 per cent of the workers are HIV positive. The mine is declared an international disaster zone by the United Nations. And green jade is still avidly collected by Princess Michael of Kent, Danielle Steele, Nicole Kidman, and used by jewellers such as Chanel, Van Cleef and Arpels. This might have been a better, more focused book if the authors had cut the history and stuck to the horrific modern-day revelations. As it stands, its hefty 400 pages are too much, and too mixed in tone. But, its weight problem aside, this is still a wholly engrossing, if ultimately horrifying read.-- Christopher Hart

Book Description:

The incredible hidden history of the world's rarest and most valuable gem stone.

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