The stone of heaven: the secret history of imperial green jade
Asked to name the most valuable stone in the world, most of us would think of diamonds, rubies - pos...
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Asked to name the most valuable stone in the world, most of us would think of diamonds, rubies - possibly emeralds. But there is something far more precious buried deep in the bedrock of the remotest mine in the world, a valley in the shadow of the Himalayas.Imperial Green Jade, so obscure in the West, has been famed in the East for a thousand years, eulogised by the Chinese as the colour of the kingfisher's neck feathers, the only thing on earth that was said to match its astonishing green hue.Today the Imperial Green Jade mine is still nearly impossible to reach, isolated by a vindictive Burmese dictatorship. This book reveals how Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark persuaded the generals to take them there and, in its final chapters, records their terrifying journey to uncover Imperial Green Jade's biggest secret.
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