Most of this book, despite its title, contains hardly a mention of jade, but not the first chapter. The Emperor of China, Qianlong, had an obsession with jade and discovered the whereabouts of a great jade bowl, weighing 3,500 kilograms, which had disappeared during the icy winter of 1745. The monks who had acquired it used it for cooking their cabbage, and were curtly informed that the Emperor would pay them a fair price for it. The bowl was wrapped in silk and horsehair mats and disappeared into the Forbidden City. There it was carved into fantastic dragons and sea-monsters, with lifelike scales, the wonder of the imperial court.
Jade has magical properties. If there were even a few grains in the nine aperatures of the body, a corpse could not putrify. Jade raises the dead, and protects a spirit in the journey to the afterlife. When the Emperor's beloved wife died young, he slept on a jade bed and used jade for all kinds of domestic purposes. The Emperor was obsessed with jade and went to every expense to acquire more and more... including a gigantic slab, 35 feet long, a difficult transport problem. Boulders containing seams of jade poured into Peking; but the Emperor sought in vain to discover the source of the precious stone.
This was north Burma, the rulers of which would not disclose their secret. They sent missions east to Peking and west to Delhi, hacking their way through jungles alive with mosquitos carrying a strain of cerebral malaria. The authors of this book spent weeks in Delhi poring through the Indo-Burman archives, but found not a mention of a jade-mine. The jade-mines, in fact, were guarded by the ferocious Kachins, who let nobody through. Kipling's India sent many a Sahib to fight his way through the upper-Burma jungles, but none was interested in jade.
A curious feature of this book is the choice of illustrations. These include Queen Elizabeth II, Lady Mountbatten, Barbara Hutton, Chiang Kai- shek and a couple of his wives, General "Vinegar Joe" Stilwell... but not a single picture of jade.
By far the best part of this book is the account of the authors' visit to jade mines, invited by Burmese generals, who insisted (mendaciously) that the jade-mine country is peaceable and welcoming. In fact, a ferocious civil war was going on there. The authors saw tribal chiefs' heads on stakes, and had to push their way through thousands of refugees. There were scores of brothels, run by and for the army, staffed by girls dying of cerebral malaria, heroin-poisoning and AIDS. Nearly everyone was sick, and the dead lay in heaps beside the roads. They saw skeletal boys jabbing at one another with blackened needles. They wanted to see the jade mines of Mpakant. "Impossible", they were told, "it is far too dangerous." But they "My administrative costs... Your difficult journey."
The jade mines, such as they were, proved to be at the very bottom of deep mud-holes. The miners were all dying of heroin poison, AIDS (which they called "jade disease") and venerial disease contracted from press-ganged prostitutes.
This is a strange book, fascinating in parts but hard to read from beginning to end since the authors know everything about Burma and China and are determined to spare us no detail, however irrelevant.
Charles Chenevix Trench's last book was Grace's Card : Irish Catholic Landlords 1690-1800 published by Mercier Press.