Red cord jade necklace: a small pierced disc in bluish green, knotted on a braided red cord punctuated with white beads. The length is set by a sliding knot.
This disc has a Chinese name, ping an kou, the buckle of peace. It is the most sold jade piece in China, and the wish it carries is modest: to pass without trouble.
No metal, no clasp. The disc comes off the cord, so it can be weighed: the record will be published. Why I write it down.
A red cord and jade necklace: a small pierced disc in a bluish green, knotted on a braided red cord punctuated by a few white beads on either side. The length is set by a sliding knot, with no clasp and no metal of any kind.
In four lines
A small pierced disc in bluish green, knotted on a braided red cord.
A few white beads on either side, which are not jade.
No metal: no clasp, no bail, no ring.
The record will be published: the disc comes off the cord, so it can be weighed.
This disc has a name, and it says what is expected of it
In contemporary Chinese this small pierced disc is called ping an kou, which translates word for word as buckle of peace or buckle of safety. It is the most sold jade piece in China, and by a very long way.
The name is recent, but the shape is not: it is the Neolithic bi, the disc with a central hole found in tombs five thousand years old, reduced to the size of a piece of jewellery. It has crossed the whole of Chinese history without changing its drawing.
What is attributed to it is held in its name, and no more: a wish for an untroubled passage, readily given for a departure, a driving licence, a move. Giving a jade piece.
The red cord, and why it is red
The choice of colour is not decorative. Red is in China the colour that keeps away what brings bad luck, and the red cord at the wrist or the neck has accompanied jade for a long time. It is worn in particular during the year of your own sign, reputed unfavourable despite what you might think.
From a practical point of view, the braided cord has three advantages over a chain: it does not snap clean, it does not scratch the stone, and it is adjusted in one movement by its sliding knot. Nothing to measure before ordering, nothing to have fitted afterwards.
It has one weakness in exchange: a thread wears, above all at the point of friction against the hole. Count on replacing it after a few years, which costs a few euros. The thread and the cord of a jade piece.
What the stone is, and what remains to be established
The green turns slightly towards blue, with a milky look and a translucency that shows on the edge of the hole, where the stone is thinnest. The white beads on the cord are not announced as jade, and I am not going to assume it in my supplier’s place.
On a green of this intensity the weighing is decisive: serpentine runs around 2.6, quartzite around 2.65, and nephrite starts at 2.90. No ambiguity is possible once the figure is obtained.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the red cord and to jade
What follows changes register, and I flag it rather than blending it into the rest of the page. Nothing here is demonstrated. These are customs and beliefs, which I report because they are part of the history of this stone. No piece in this shop is sold as a remedy, and I claim no effect for this one.
The buckle of peaceThe Chinese name of the disc, ping an kou, says buckle of peace. The wish is modest and precise: to pass without trouble. It is given for a departure, a driving test, a move elsewhere, and it commits to nothing more.
The red that wards offRed is the colour that repels bad luck throughout the Chinese world, from New Year envelopes to the doors of houses. A red cord is never a neutral choice, and it is the most loaded element of this piece.
The year of your own signContrary to what you would expect, the year of your sign is reputed unfavourable, and many wear red that year to guard against it. It is one of the liveliest superstitions of the Chinese calendar.
A stone of moral virtueIn Confucian thought, jade is associated with qualities of character rather than effects on the body: uprightness, constancy, restraint. It is the best documented meaning of them all.
Dispatched within 48 hours of your order being confirmed, for delivery within 14 days from dispatch. I keep no buffer stock, and I won’t promise a timeframe I couldn’t meet.
Postage charges
€6.99 to any destination, free on orders of €47 or more to France, Belgium, Switzerland and Luxembourg. The exact amount appears in the cart before you pay.
The packaging, and why it matters
Every piece ships in its own pouch, kept apart from the others. This isn’t about presentation: the hardness of jade is ordinary, between 6 and 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite, and the quartz in everyday dust sits at 7. Two pieces of jewellery that travel together end up scratching each other.
Fourteen days to change your mind
With no need to explain yourself. An email is enough to open a return, there is no form to fill in. Return postage is at your expense, unless the piece doesn’t match its listing or arrives damaged.
The wrong size is the main reason for a return in this category, and jade cannot be resized the way a solid metal band can. Two minutes of measuring almost always prevents it. The size guide.
Warm water, mild soap, a soft cloth. A very soft brush for the hollows of a carving. That’s all, and it’s enough.
What you must never do, and why
No ultrasonic cleaner, no steam, no solvent, no heat source. This isn’t a token precaution: the treatment status of my pieces is not established. My supplier doesn’t know, and weighing establishes the mineral without saying anything about a possible resin impregnation. Resin tolerates neither heat nor solvents, so every piece is handled as though it might contain some. The information sheet on treatments.
Scratches, and where they come from
Jade is tough, meaning very hard to break: its interlocking crystal structure resists fracturing, and that is why axes could be shaped from it in the Neolithic. Its hardness, on the other hand, is ordinary, 6 to 6.5 for nephrite and 6.5 to 7 for jadeite. The quartz in everyday dust sits at 7: that is what dulls jade, not knocks. The difference between the two.
Day to day
Put the piece on after perfume and cream, never before. Take it off for housework, gardening and sport, where the knocks against corners happen. Store each piece on its own, in its pouch. On a strand of beads, the thread wears out before the stone: it gets restrung, and there is nothing abnormal about that.
My name is Jade. I’m French, from Morbihan, and based in Tallinn. I choose the pieces and have them set: I mine nothing, I cut nothing, and I don’t do the metalwork myself. The work I do is the sorting, and with this material that is what decides everything.
I am neither a gemmologist, nor a lapidary, nor a therapist, and I don’t claim to be.
I weigh, I don’t certify
Before putting a reference online, I order one example of it for myself. When it reaches me unset, I weigh it in air, then suspended from a thread in a glass of water: the ratio of the two masses gives the density, and that figure separates jadeite, nephrite, serpentine and dyed quartzite without ambiguity.
One example per reference, not every piece. I don’t handle the piece that goes out to you, and I would rather say so than let you believe otherwise. The method, with its three limits.
What I can’t know
The treatment status of my pieces. My supplier doesn’t know, and the scales say nothing about it: they establish the mineral, not the resin impregnation. Only infrared spectroscopy in a laboratory would settle it, and I don’t have that done. So you will never read “jadeite A”, “type A” or “untreated” on this site. The information sheet.
Where my jade comes from
No Burmese jadeite, and the first reason is a legal one. Not the reason you read everywhere: the JADE Act of 2008 did indeed ban these stones in the United States, but that ban was lifted on 7 October 2016. What applies today dates from 8 April 2021: the US Treasury sanctioned Myanma Gems Enterprise, the state-owned company that controls the Burmese gem trade. So there is no general ban, but an American is not allowed to trade with that entity, and a stone never tells you where it has passed through. One single supply chain for ten markets: it has to hold up for the most demanding of them. When an origin isn’t confirmed to me in writing, the listing doesn’t state it. My sourcing policy.
