White jade: mutton-fat nephrite, icy jadeite, and the marble that borrowed the name

For two thousand years of the Chinese record, white was not one jade color among many. It was the best one. The Book of Rites hands out jade by rank and gives white to the Son of Heaven, with the greener stones going to the dukes and grandees below him, a list our types of jade page reads in full. In 1637 the Ming craftsman Song Yingxing, in his survey of Chinese industry, the Tiangong Kaiwu, opened his account of the stone by saying that jade comes in only two colors, white and green, and that the red and yellow kinds people talk about are curious stones and not jade at all.

He was describing nephrite, the only jade China knew before Burmese jadeite arrived in the late 1700s, and the chemistry agrees with his ranking. Nephrite is a felt of tremolite fibers, and pure magnesium tremolite is creamy white; the color grades toward dark green as iron creeps into the crystal. White nephrite is the stone at its cleanest. Green nephrite is the same stone with iron in it. A tradition that prized purity was, without knowing the word for it, prizing the absence of iron.

Song Yingxing's jade came from Khotan, on the southern edge of the Taklamakan, where two rivers carry pebbles down from the mountains: the White Jade River, flowing southeast, and the Green Jade River, flowing northwest. Nobody mined it. It was gathered from the riverbeds, and his explanation of how is the loveliest passage in the chapter.

Jade, he writes, is born of the moon's light. So the people along the river go out to look for it on bright moonlit nights in autumn, watching the water, because where the raw jade lies heaped together the moonlight shines twice as bright. The pebbles roll along with the current, mixed in with ordinary stones in the shallows, and you only know which is which once you pick it up and look.

He also records, with visible disapproval, a local custom of sending women into the river naked to gather the stones, on the theory that their yin would call to the jade and hold it still, and he suggests this is just the foolishness of foreigners. What he does not doubt for a moment is the moon. A white stone that seems to gather moonlight is about the best description of mutton-fat nephrite anyone has written, and it is four hundred years old.

If you want the classical meaning of white jade in one line, it is in the Book of Songs, in a long poem of advice to a ruler. A flaw in a white jade tablet, it says, can still be polished away. A flaw in what you say cannot be undone. The tablet is the gui, the flat white jade a noble held at court, and the point is that the most precious object in the room is easier to repair than a careless sentence.

The line mattered enough that it turns up in the Analects. One of Confucius's disciples, Nan Rong, made a habit of repeating the White Tablet verse, over and over, and Confucius gave him his elder brother's daughter in marriage. That is the whole entry. A man who kept reminding himself that words cannot be polished was, in Confucius's judgment, a safe man to marry into the family.

So white jade, in the Chinese record, means rank, and it means conduct without a flaw, and the flaw is the important half. A stone prized for being white is a stone in which every blemish shows. Our page on what wearing jade means covers the wider set of virtues, and the protection page covers the one place white jade really was used as a charm, the small Han dynasty amulets carved with a spell against plague demons. What you will not find in any classical source is the idea that white jade heals, calms or purifies the wearer. That language comes from the modern crystal trade.

The finest white nephrite is called mutton-fat jade, and the name is a description, not a brand. It means a white that is warm rather than chalky, a texture so fine that no grain shows, and a soft greasy luster like fat that has set in a cold pan. Song Yingxing already used the word, praising a boulder from Korea that held mutton-fat jade inside it as fine as anything from the western mountains. It is a grade of nephrite, and every dealer's judgment of it is a judgment, not a measurement.

The word that does carry a technical meaning is Hetian, the modern spelling of Khotan, and it does not mean what most buyers assume. At a 2018 meeting in Beijing organized by the Xinjiang Hetian jade trade association, the experts described the term as having moved through three meanings: traditional Hetian jade from Khotan itself, Xinjiang Hetian jade from anywhere in the province, and what they called national-standard Hetian jade, defined by its tremolite composition. The specimen set they released covered material the market sells under the name from Qinghai, Liaoning, Russia and South Korea. A 2016 article carried by the website of the CPPCC's own newspaper put it in one sentence: under the national identification standard, Hetian jade does not specifically mean jade produced in Hetian, but is the general name for a class of tremolite jade.

That is not a scandal. White nephrite from Siberia or Qinghai is real nephrite. It just means that "Hetian white jade" on a certificate tells you the mineral, and if you are paying for a story about the Khotan rivers, the origin is a separate question you have to ask. The real or fake page covers what else a certificate should and should not say.

White jadeite is a different stone and a different idea of beauty. Pure jadeite has no color at all. As Hughes and his co-authors explain in their survey of Burmese jade, it looks white only because light scatters off the countless grain boundaries and tiny inclusions inside it. Fewer boundaries, less scattering, and the stone starts to look like frosted glass, then like ice.

So white jadeite is priced the opposite way to mutton-fat. Nephrite is admired for holding light in; jadeite is admired for letting it through. GIA describes jadeite as ranging from semi-transparent to opaque, and in the white stones that range is nearly the whole price. An opaque white jadeite bangle is an inexpensive thing. A clear, even, icy one is not, and because a clear stone hides nothing, it is also the kind most worth having tested for bleaching and resin before you buy.

Walk through the Forbidden City and you are surrounded by white jade, at least by name. The white stone of the balustrades, terraces and carved ramps of the Beijing palaces was quarried at Fangshan, at the southwest corner of the city, and it has long been known as hanbaiyu, usually translated as Chinese white jade or Han white jade. It is marble. China Daily's profile of a carver in Dashiwo, the Fangshan town that supplied it, describes its white marble as widely used in royal palaces, gardens and mausoleums, and names one of the most famous pieces, the great slab behind the Hall of Preserving Harmony carved with nine dragons among mountains and waves.

Nobody was being deceived in the Qing dynasty; the name is an architect's compliment, not a mineral claim. But it explains a good deal of what turns up today as "white jade" in carvings and cheap bracelets. Marble is calcite or dolomite, 3 to 4 on the Mohs scale of hardness against 6 or more for either jade, so it wears soft and chalky at the edges, and in good light it often shows a sugary sparkle of separate crystals that neither jade has. White quartzite, dyed or not, and glass fill the rest of the shelf. Our types page lists the usual impostors with the trade names they travel under.

Decide first which white you want, because the two jades reward opposite things. For a nephrite bangle, look for a white that is warm rather than paper-white, an oily luster rather than a glassy one, a texture with no visible grain, and, above all, no cracks: the White Tablet verse is a good shopping rule, because a white stone shows every flaw and a crack in a bangle cannot be polished out. For a jadeite bangle, hold it to a window and judge how much light comes through and how evenly.

Then read the listing for the name of the mineral. "Nephrite" or "jadeite" is a claim a seller can be held to. "White jade" alone is not, and "Han white jade" is a marble. A bangle is a closed ring cut from a single piece, so measure your hand with the bangle size calculator before you order, and keep it clean the way the jade care page describes; the one thing a white stone does not forgive is grime worked into a crack.