Teachers - The following is a handout for students filled with facts about jade. You are welcome to modify it so that it is appropriate for your students' grade level. We recommend that you share this information with your students prior to our visit.  

 Part of nephrite boulder from which The Jade Book was made.

Jade/Nephrite

• The type of jade found in British Columbia is nephrite.*
• Nephrite is a silicate of calcium and magnesium and often contains iron.
• Nephrite is harder than most steels. It measures 6-6 ½ on the Mohs Scale for hardness. Diamond measures 10.
• Nephrite is the toughest naturally occurring material on Earth; it is the stone with the most resistance to breaking.
• Modern steel tools must be diamond-tipped in order to cut nephrite.
• Nephrite has been found in Canada, U.S.A., New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, China, Russia, Poland, Italy, Switzerland, South Korea, and South Africa. It has been found in a wide variety of colours including white, brown, yellow, green, blue, pink, red, gray, and black.
• In North America, the nephrite-bearing belt occurs where the Coast Mountains meet the Rockies and extends through Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, and Wyoming. 
• Jade/Nephrite is B.C.’s mineral emblem.
• B.C.’s jade contains iron and is yellow-green in hue.
• B.C. is the world’s top exporter of jade, producing over 200 of the world’s 300 tonnes available annually.   
• B.C.’s jade is sold mostly to China, Taiwan, and New Zealand.
• 3,000 years ago, First Nations people (particularly the Salish) discovered jade in B.C. They used water and sandstone saws to cut the jade boulders they found in the Fraser, Bridge, and Thompson rivers. It took them months and years to grind the stone into tools and weapons.
• In the mid-to-late 1800s, during the Gold Rush, Chinese miners discovered jade in the Fraser and Bridge rivers. They recognized the stone, and, knowing its value, they shipped it to China in the coffins of family members and friends who had died while mining or building the Canadian Pacific Railway.  
• In the late 1960s, B.C.’s modern jade mining industry began when jade prospectors discovered jade in areas as far north as the Cassiar Segment, the area surrounding Dease Lake – a town now carrying the title, “Jade Capital of the World.”
• B.C.’s jade is used to make things like table tops, tiles, lamp shades, sculptures – many in the form of North American wildlife such as Grizzly Bears – and both inexpensive and high-end jewelry.
• Ancient Chinese emperors preferred white jade and then green. They called nephrite the Stone of Heaven. They buried jade objects with their loved ones, plugged the orifices of their dead with jade, and covered their deceased emperors with grave suits made up of thousands of square jade plaques. They believed nephrite was a stone that could lead them to the afterlife, a stone of immortality.
• Confucius, China’s ancient philosopher and politician (551-479 BC), attributed such qualities as “virtue, loyalty, intelligence, justice, humanity, and truth” to nephrite. He also believed that fractures in nephrite were symbolic of sincerity.*
• The world’s largest jade Buddha was made from a 32-tonne piece of jade; this piece came from an 80-tonne jade boulder discovered along Wheaton Creek in B.C.’s Cassiar Mountain Range. Phra Yanaviriyajan, an abbot from the Wat Dhammamongkol Monastery in Bangkok, Thailand, where the Buddha is now housed, conceived of the idea. The Buddha was carved by Ismail Zizi and Paolo Viaggi from 1992-1994.
• The Jade Book was made from a 3,000 pound boulder which was discovered in a site named “The Super Bowl” located in the Provencher Mountains in B.C.’s Cassiar Mountain Range. The Jade Book is a 19 x 18 x 6.5-inch, 151-pound book made entirely out of jade with bound pages that can be turned. It has the images and words of Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi carved in shallow-relief on its pages and the carved image of a dove breaking free of prison bars on its cover. The dove’s escape symbolizes the hope for peace. The Jade Book is the product of over 5,000 hours of painstaking labour, including the thinking and planning stages. It was carved in Coquitlam, B.C. by sculptor Cosimo Geracitano from 2000-2002.

Written by Daniela G. Vance

* There are two stones known as jade. One is nephrite; the other is jadeite. Jadeite is a silicate of sodium and aluminum and is, therefore, an entirely different stone from nephrite. Jadeite is harder but not tougher than nephrite. It is not found in Canada. It is extremely rare and expensive. The best quality jadeite is imperial green in colour and has been found in Burma since the late 1700s. Fred Ward’s book, Jade, describes how both nephrite and jadeite ended up sharing the same title. (Ward, Fred. Jade. Bethesda, MD: Gem Book Publishers, 1996.)