How the jade is beeing found

Finding jade stones is mor than on any other thing based on faculty and innate sensitivity of the searchers, qualities which they have developed from childhood on and which they complete with the hard work testing the stones with big hammers in the solitudes of the mountains.

In its natural state the jade is deceptive since  for neophyte persons it passes unnoticed between a pile of stones. Only professional jade searchers usually find it, basing themselves first on hardness and weight tests, after that determining the colour and composition.

Due to the density of the jade, the weight of the stone is higher than that of any other material. To carry a stone of normal size, lets say of about 30 cm³, great effort or the help of a beast of burden is needed. When the stone occasionally exceeds a transportable size, it has to be devided by hits of tyre hammers, taking advantage of its natural fractures.

In Burma the profession of jade searcher is transmitted in a family from generation to generation. In China, in the mountains of Sinkiang, it is a profession for women, who have developed a certain skill to detect with their feet the nefite stones under the cold water of the rivers, which cross the high mountains. And according to their beliefs only the feminine skin attract the masculine qualities, which are represented in the jade.

Brother Bernardino of Sahagun, noted in cronicles – Gral History of the New Spain’s things – that there lived people in Mexico, who dedicated themselves to the search of precious stones, among them the jade. In the colonial epoque arose many legeds around the stone searchers.        

The fact is that the jade sources were protected as state secrets and that the poblation of the mountains, where they were found, was not allowed. A proof for that were the military garissons of the Aztecs near Zinacantan, Ixtapa and Huixtan, which actually are villages, which surround the holy mountains of Chalchihuitan, uninhabited until many years after the conquest, when all the value of the jade was gone.