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Featured Categories : Travel & Holiday : Countries & Regions : Asia : Myanmar (Burma)
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The Stone of Heaven: the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade by Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott Clark is one of those remarkable travel-cum-history books that manages to combine both glamour and mystery with the exposure of moral squalor and appalling political corruption. These are the things that gold, silver, diamonds have generated throughout history--and so too, it seems, has imperial green jade. The facts about the "stone of heaven" sound more like the wildest fictions of swashbuckling storytellers like Rider Haggard, or perhaps even Wilbur Smith. It is by far the most valuable stone in the world (diamonds are positively cheap compared to this stuff), and in its purest form, it derives from only one source: a remote mine in a valley in the very shadow of the Himalayas. The authors take us competently through the history of green jade, brought to life most entertainingly of all in the 18th-century skirmishes between the British and the Chinese--in terms of wiliness and cunning, a fine match for each other. They give us some great "well, would you believe it?" facts (one Chinese Emperor wrote more than 800 poems to his beloved jade collection). But the book really ignites towards the end, and becomes something very different, when Levy and Scott-Clark finally reach the world's only jade mine, now in Burma. Here there are facts to be learned that truly beggar belief. The mines are worked by around one million men, women and children. They are paid in government-supplied heroin. Needles are shared between around 800 people at a time. 99.9 per cent of the workers are HIV positive. The mine is declared an international disaster zone by the United Nations. And green jade is still avidly collected by Princess Michael of Kent, Danielle Steele, Nicole Kidman, and used by jewellers such as Chanel, Van Cleef and Arpels. This might have been a better, more focused book if the authors had cut the history and stuck to the horrific modern-day revelations. As it stands, its hefty 400 pages are too much, and too mixed in tone. But, its weight problem aside, this is still a wholly engrossing, if ultimately horrifying read.--Christopher Hart
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