A pale green jade pendant: a small pierced disc, in a water green so light it turns towards blue, mounted on a fine black cord stopped by a black bead. The stone is translucent right through, and the light passes frankly across it.
In four lines
A small pierced disc, in a very light water green.
Translucent right through: the light passes across it.
Fine black cord, black stopper bead, no metal at all.
The record will be published: the disc slides off, so it weighs.
The pierced disc, the oldest shape of all
This disc with a hole at its centre has a Chinese name, bi, and it is one of the oldest jade objects known: they turn up in Neolithic tombs, long before writing. Nobody knows with certainty what they were for.
The hypotheses turn around the sky, of which the disc would be the image, and the rank of the dead, of which the number of pieces would say something. Those are hypotheses, not facts, and a product page is not the place to present them otherwise.
What is certain is that the shape has crossed five thousand years without changing, and that it remains the most worn of them all. The shop sells several versions: all the pendants in the shop.
A stone to hold up to the window
This is the palest pendant in the catalogue, and the photographs do it poor justice. Laid on a table it looks almost white. Held against the light it turns water green, with a readable gradient between the thin edge and the rim of the hole where the material is thickest.
That frank translucency is one of the things to look at in judging a stone, and it is easy to observe here because the disc is thin. It rules nothing out, though: fine serpentine is translucent too, and so are some quartzites.
The mounting does not get in the way of looking, since there is none. A cord, a knot, a stopper bead. The checks that need no equipment.
A pale stone, and why the weighing needs more care
On a deep green, density separates cleanly: serpentine around 2.6, quartzite around 2.65, nephrite from 2.90. On a stone this pale a fourth candidate joins in, dolomitic marble, sold under the name white jade, which reaches 2.85.
2.85 against 2.90, the margin is thin. So I will not stop at the figure: I will also look at the grain under raking light, because a marble shows crystalline patches that glint by facets where a nephrite shows a fibrous felting.
Outside Burma, country of extraction not confirmed
What tradition attributes to the disc 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.
An object older than writingThe first pierced discs come out of Neolithic tombs, in the Liangzhu culture, more than three thousand years before our era. Dozens are found around a single body. Their exact function remains debated, and the archaeologists say so themselves.
The disc of heavenThe commonest reading makes it an image of heaven, round, as against the square tube that would figure the earth. It comes from texts far later than the objects, and it may be a late reconstruction rather than an original meaning.
The water green of scholarly tasteVery pale jades were long preferred to bright greens in cultivated Chinese taste, where restraint counts for more than brilliance. The fashion for intense green is recent and owes much to the trade in Burmese jadeite.
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.
