The jade industry has a saying: "One cut makes you a king, one cut makes you a beggar." The moment a stone is cut open, you either soar to heaven or plummet to hell—there's no in-between. This is why jade gambling is the ultimate gamble: no matter how carefully you study the exterior, the moment of truth is the cut.
Uncle Harvey and I returned from the Myanmar Emporium in good spirits, but I didn't stay in Ruili long. Back home in Tengchong, my own life was waiting.
In my first foray into jade gambling, I'd walked away with a 30,000-plus RMB profit—a sum that, for me, was not negligible. I hadn't even put up any capital; Uncle Harvey had fronted everything. For a craftsman who typically earned piece-rate wages, 30,000 was two or three months of work. And now I'd gotten it in just one week.
This was the allure of jade gambling. But it was also its danger.
When I got home to Tengchong, Master Wells was working on a piece of amber.
"What have you been up to?" Master Wells asked, grinning at me. "Your mom said you went to Myanmar."
"I went to the emporium with Uncle Harvey."
"Oh? Make any money?"
"I got lucky."
Master Wells set down his tools. "Tell me."
I related the entire story—from Uncle Harvey asking me to bid, to my accidental overbid, to the cut revealing the center patch that turned out to be glass-grade. Master Wells listened with great interest.
When I finished, Master Wells said, "You got lucky. But don't go chasing that luck."
"What do you mean?"
"Jade gambling is like the casinos in Macau. In the beginning, they always let you win. That way, you think you're special—you think you can beat the system. And then you go all in."
"Master Wells, I know what I'm doing."
"You think Uncle Harvey took you there out of the goodness of his heart?"
That stopped me. "What do you mean?"
Master Wells picked up his carving tool again and resumed working on the amber. "Think about it. Why would a successful jade merchant bring an apprentice carver to the biggest jade auction in the world? Did he need your expertise? Your money? Your connections?"
"He needed someone to bid on his behalf so he wouldn't be followed."
"Exactly. He needed a pawn. Someone expendable. Someone who wouldn't know the real value of what they were bidding on."
"But he gave me the profit from the stone—"
"He gave you thirty thousand on a stone worth eight hundred thousand. And you think he's generous?"
The number hung in the air. I hadn't thought of it that way, but now that Master Wells said it, the math was stark. 800,000 total value, and I got 30,000? That was less than 4%.
"He taught me a lot at the emporium," I protested.
"He taught you what he wanted you to see," Master Wells replied. "I'm not saying Uncle Harvey is a bad man. I'm saying this: in the jade business, nobody does anything for free. If someone is being nice to you, figure out what they're getting out of it."
I didn't want to believe it, but Master Wells's words planted a seed of doubt that I couldn't shake.
---
A few days later, I was back at work in the carving shop. My recent windfall hadn't changed my daily routine—I still showed up, still practiced my craft on smaller pieces, still studied under Master Wells.
But something had shifted in me. I was looking at raw jade differently now. Before Myanmar, I'd seen jade only as raw material for my craft—something to be shaped, carved, polished into beautiful forms. Now I found myself eyeing the texture, calculating the internal structure, estimating whether the piece would "gamble up" or not.
This was a dangerous habit for an apprentice carver. Carvers and gamblers were natural opposites—or at least, they should have been. A carver's job was to coax beauty out of certainty. A gambler's job was to bet on what couldn't be seen.
One afternoon, a local merchant named Old Rivera came to our shop with a stone. He was a short, stocky man with a perpetual smile, known around Tengchong for dealing in mid-range jade.
"Master Wells! Just got something I think you'll like," Old Rivera announced loudly, setting a gray-green stone on the workbench.
Master Wells examined it briefly. "Muna mine. Medium texture. What's your asking price?"
"Forty thousand."
"For a stone this size with visible cracks? You're dreaming."
Old Rivera laughed. "Business has been slow. I need to eat too!"
They haggled back and forth for a while, eventually settling on 25,000. Old Rivera left happy, and Master Wells handed me the stone.
"Your project. Let's see what you can do with a real piece."
I studied the stone carefully. Gray-green rind, visible cracks running in two directions, and a small window that Master Wells had already pointed out to me. Through the window, the texture looked decent—fine grain, slight translucency.
But I couldn't stop myself from thinking: what if I could make a gambling cut? What if I cut away the rind and found something incredible underneath?
"Don't even think about it," Master Wells said, as if reading my mind.
"Think about what?"
"Gambling. You're here to learn carving, not to chase stones."
I picked up my tools and started marking the stone for the first rough cut. But my mind was elsewhere—on that center patch of glass-grade jade from the Myanmar Emporium. On the flash of fluorescence when the flashlight pressed against the dark interior. On the way the blackness had transformed into pure brilliance.
That night, after Master Wells had left the shop, I stayed behind. I picked up the stone I was working on, held it under the lamp, and imagined what might be hidden inside it.
Was this how every jade gambler started? With a vision of what could be, rather than what was?
---
The next morning, Master Wells caught me examining the stone's rind with a loupe before starting work.
"Interesting?" he asked.
"There's a section here where the rind is unusually smooth. Almost polished. Could be nothing, but—"
"But it could be something," Master Wells finished. "That's the trap. Every piece of jade whispers 'there's something inside me.' Most of the time, there isn't."
He was right, of course. But that whisper was getting louder.
A week later, I got a call from Uncle Harvey.
"Zane, how would you like to come back to Ruili? I have a job opportunity."
"What kind of opportunity?"
"A client of mine has some rough stones that need appraising. I told him about your eye for jade, and he'd like you to take a look."
My heart rate quickened. Another chance to be in the jade world, to be around raw stones, to feel that electric thrill of not knowing what lay beneath the surface.
"When?"
"This weekend. I'll send you the address."
I hung up and sat there for a long time, staring at the half-carved piece on my workbench. Master Wells's warning echoed in my ears: "In the jade business, nobody does anything for free."
But I was already planning my trip to Ruili.