Jade bagua pendant: an octagonal plaque, the yin and the yang engraved at the centre and the eight trigrams around it, one to each face. Knotted to a strand of green and black beads.
The eight figures are all different, none repeated: that is what separates a careful engraving from a copy. The octagon has the advantage of not spinning on its cord.
The beads of the strand are not announced as jade, and the page says so. The plaque unties, so it weighs: the record will be published. Why I write it down.
A jade bagua pendant: a regular octagonal plaque, the yin and the yang engraved at the centre, and the eight trigrams set around it, one to each face. The rim is picked out with a beaded fillet. It is knotted to a strand of green and black beads.
In four lines
A regular octagon, one trigram to each face, cut in hollow.
The yin and the yang at the centre, on a slightly domed disc.
Beaded fillet all round the rim, back smooth and polished.
The record will be published: the plaque unties, so it weighs.
What the eight signs really say
Each of the eight faces carries a trigram, that is a stack of three lines, solid or broken. Eight combinations are possible, and these are exactly the eight shown here: none repeated, none missing. That is a good mark of quality, because sloppy copies often repeat the same sign.
These trigrams come from the Yi Jing, the Book of Changes, a Chinese text compiled more than two thousand years ago. Each figure carries a name and a set of images: heaven, earth, water, fire, mountain, lake, thunder, wind.
The arrangement around the central disc is not decorative either: two traditional orders exist, the Earlier Heaven and the Later Heaven, and they do not place the same signs facing each other. My supplier does not say which one is engraved here, and I am not going to decide on his behalf.
An octagon, and why it wears well
The octagon has a practical advantage the disc does not: it does not spin. A pierced disc pivots at the end of its cord and always ends up showing its back. An eight sided plaque settles and stays the right way round, which matters when the face carries an oriented design.
The format is medium, distinctly wider than tall once at the neck, and the back is entirely smooth. The beaded fillet running round the rim softens the edge, so the stone does not catch on fabric.
What the stone is, and what remains to be established
The green is deep, almost bottle in the thick zones, and lightens markedly along the edges of the faces. That variation in thickness is good ground for observation: a stone that lightens where it is thin is translucent, which already rules out certain opaque materials.
That is not enough to conclude. What is sold under the name jade is very often serpentine or dyed quartzite, and only the density settles it without a laboratory. On this reference it is measurable, since the knot undoes.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the bagua 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.
A book before it was a signThe eight trigrams come from the Yi Jing, the Book of Changes, a divination manual that became one of the classics of Chinese thought. Confucius commented on it, and for two millennia it was read as a treatise on change far more than as a manual of fortune telling.
The mirror above the doorIn popular use the bagua is placed above an entrance, often with a small mirror at the centre. It is an object of thresholds, set on a building rather than worn. Its pendant version is recent and far more decorative.
Two halves that contain each otherThe central disc does not oppose black to white: each half carries a dot of the other colour, and the line between them is curved. The image says that nothing is pure or fixed, not that there is a good side and a bad one.
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.
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.
