Burmese jade
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Book | Broken Bangle | The Blunder-Besmirched History of Jade Nomenclature | 2024
Broken Bangle • The Blunder-Besmirched History of Jade Nomenclature
Liu Shang-i, Richard W. Hughes, Zhou Zhengyu and Kaylan Khourie | 2024
In recent years, jade nomenclature has been upended by the discovery by gemologists that the gem being sold as "jadeiite" is actually a rock composed of three different pyroxene minerals. But the problems of jade nomenclature run much deeper, literally to the application of the words nephrite and jadeite to jade in the mid-19th century. Already by the 1930s, mineralogists realized that one should not apply the name of a mineral species to a rock, but this knowledge sadly never made its way into the gemological lexicon. Broken Bangle tackles jade nomenclature from the earliest times to the present day, advocating that the mineral species names jadeite, omphacite and kosmochlor not be used because their application to rocks does not follow standard mineralogical/geological practices. In addition, breaking down rocks into their mineral components is not done anywhere else in gemology. Instead, the authors suggest that the traditional Chinese term fei cui be used for the pyroxene jade gems.
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Book | Nephrite and Jadeite | First English Translation of this 1875 Classic | 2025
Nephrite and Jadeite • Translated from the German original of 1875
Heinrich Fischer | Edited/Translated by Richard W. Hughes | 2025
In 1875, Leopold Heinrich Fischer (b. 1817; d. 1886) published an extraordinary work on jade, Nephrit und Jadeit, by far the most comprehensive ever to appear. Fischer examined jade not just from China, but from around the world. His book was the first ever to appear in a Western language entirely devoted to jade as we know it today. As you thumb through the pages that follow, the depth of Fischer’s work will amaze. There is an astonishing amount of detail here. That this could be the product of a single author is simply beyond belief. Fischer goes on and on, as he tracks virtually every Western (and some Oriental) source. One senses an obsession, days in cold museums and libraries examining dusty texts, sleepless nights poring over a candle-lit desk scratching out sentences with a quill, condensing this enormous body of human history into a book of just a few hundred pages. It is truly astounding and a book that will delight those who open its pages. This English translation includes a special 43-page appendix containing full bibliographic details of all the references cited by Fischer, as well as additional references on jade in both Western languages and Chinese, making it a valuable resource for scholars.