The ethnic Kachin, though native to the jade hills, control few of the mines. Global Witness, an international watchdog that monitors natural-resource exploitation, estimates that Myanmar’s jade trade was worth up to $31 billion in 2014, nearly half the nation’s GDP that year. Jade comes in many hues, from the shade of a kingfisher’s throat to what the Chinese describe as “moss entangled with melting snow.” But for the people of Myanmar, it is stained, most of all, by blood.įew countries’ economies are so bound to one resource. The stone of heaven, as it is known in China, is also fueling civil war between the Burmese military and ethnic Kachin guerrillas seeking self-rule. Tying the precious stone to dispensable miners is a web of Burmese military-linked firms, Chinese companies, ethnic rebel commanders and drug kingpins wanted by the U.S. The roughly 300,000 jade pickers who sift through the detritus left by larger mining operations are migrants whose lives are threatened by landslides, drug addiction and disease. The rock-a translucent mass of sodium aluminum silicate known as jadeite-is one of the world’s most coveted gems, chiefly among the Chinese, whose growing buying power has spurred record sales. Man and rock exist in inverse value in the Himalayan foothills of Myanmar’s Kachin state, wedged between India and China. “We don’t know who is buried in there,” he says. In the months since the landslide, the mass of stony waste at Hmaw Sisar, where Ye Min Naing still forages, has only grown more perilous. Most freelance miners in these hills, which produce nearly every piece of the world’s finest jade, are drug-addicted migrants, strangers to one another and lost to their families. Three people, Ye Min Naing thinks, were killed, but who really knows? Like many deaths in the mines of Hpakant township in northern Myanmar (once known as Burma), this accident never appeared in the media. Somehow fellow wildcat miners pulled him out, along with a 19-year-old who was left paralyzed by the accident. “Up to here,” the 28-year-old says, making a slashing motion at his neck. Then a friend working near him was swallowed by a surge of earth. Ye Min Naing heard the landslide before he saw it, a bass note that rattled his bones like thunder. A truck with wheels the height of a man had just deposited loose stones at the edge of the mountain, sending hundreds of scavengers scrambling through the tailings in hopes of finding a precious lump of jade. ![]() It was a rainy night six months ago, at the tail end of the monsoons. ![]() When the earth collapsed, as it does nearly every day in the jade hills of Myanmar, Ye Min Naing was poised on a steep slope of rubble and scree. An exclusive reportīy Hannah Beech/Hpakant | Photographs by adam dean Myanmar’s jade mines may yield great wealth-but they leave a long trail of death.
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