Uncle Harvey brought me to meet Old Garrett of Delong.
Old Garrett was a legend at the Delong night market. Back when his business was at its lowest point, on the verge of bankruptcy, he bought a small Houting stone for 8,000 yuan, cut it open, and found over ten million yuan worth of imperial green jadeite. To say he turned his fortune around through jade gambling was no exaggeration at all.
Old Garrett sat across from us, wearing a bright blue polo shirt with the collar fully popped up—peak middle-aged fashion.
"Have you ever cut stones?"
His first question upon seeing me was exactly this. Before I could answer, he added:
"Then don't buy gambling stones! Don't touch that stuff!"
Wasn't this rich? A boss who made his fortune through jade gambling, telling me not to gamble on stones? Of all the people qualified to warn someone away from jade gambling, he had the least credibility.
I asked Old Garrett, "Mr. Garrett, why do you say that?"
"You can't win at jade gambling."
"Completely impossible?"
"Completely impossible." Old Garrett said this with such disdain that it irked me.
"But I feel like after a year of learning carving, I have a rational and objective understanding of jadeite," I argued. "Besides, if I stick to buying known material for carving, I won't fall into the trap of gambling addiction. Even though I still have a lot to learn, if I were to buy gambling stones, I definitely wouldn't make major mistakes. And when I encounter something I understand well, I think I can always bet right and cut a winner!"
"Oh? Young people these days are this confident?" Old Garrett, mid-lecture, seemed surprised by my pushback.
"Youngsters are always this cocky!" Uncle Harvey chimed in from the side.
Old Garrett laughed and pulled open his desk drawer. He rummaged around, pulled out one stone, rummaged some more, pulled out two more. He lined all three stones up on the table.
"Here, look at these three gambling stones."
At first glance, all three looked promising—they seemed to have real substance inside!
Before I could examine them closely, Old Garrett said, "You claim you can't be fooled. Today I'm going to test you—do you have the ability to distinguish real from fake raw stones? Among these three, which one is genuine, untouched by human hands? If you can tell, I'll let you pick any raw stone from my shop today, free of charge, to support your carving career."
The moment he said that, I half-stood up and leaned in to study the three stones closely.
The first stone on the left was an open-cut piece with a grayish-black rind and coarse sand-grain texture. About the size of a large fist, with one end cut away. At the cut surface, the crystalline structure appeared very fine under natural light, and it revealed both yellow and green colors—exceptionally beautiful. Yellow jade and green jadeite side by side: the green was the primary color caused by chromium, and the yellow was the secondary color caused by iron. When both colors appeared on the same piece, it was called "yellow-plus-green," historically the most valuable single-surface type of jadeite.
The second stone in the middle was an opened-window piece with a "frog skin" rind—deep black with a greenish tint, glossy and slick. A narrow, irregular path had been opened on this stone, with patterns resembling the pine-flower designs on century eggs, or like the floaters you see when you close your eyes. When a flashlight was shone through the window, the interior revealed premium-grade "zhengyang" green—extraordinarily warm, rich green color—and the transparency was excellent, the light penetrating deeply, both translucent and green.
The third stone was about the size of a palm, with a deep red rind that showed hints of yellow, and the rind itself was extremely fine and smooth, like river-worn pebbles. This raw stone was likely from the Dama Kan mine, a "water stone"—so called because, like river pebbles, it had tumbled from the mountains into water and been worn smooth by years of river current and sand. Many carvers preserved the natural rind of water stones, using it to carve a monk's cassock or a baby dragon's eggshell—both creative and beautiful.
After examining the first stone, I looked around at Old Garrett's shop, where raw stones covered the shelves and even the floor. These were the prize for answering correctly. Pick any one—I was practically drooling just thinking about it. And all three stones, at first glance, seemed like excellent material. But Old Garrett had asked me to find the one genuine, unaltered stone among them. This was no simple test!
"So? Can you figure it out?"
"Let me take a careful look." I pulled each stone in front of me and stared intently.
Old Garrett and Uncle Harvey drank tea while I studied the stones earnestly. After about twenty minutes, I could only identify a problem with one stone. The other two—one must be fake, but which was genuine and which was fake was incredibly hard to determine.
"Taking too long! If you haven't figured it out by now, you won't figure it out in another ten minutes either!" Old Garrett saw right through me.
"Distinguishing raw stones isn't just about eyes. If you're only looking, you might as well browse photos online. You've read a lot—have you studied the Buddhist sutras?"
"A little bit."
"Let me test you. What are the six consciousnesses in Buddhism?"
"Eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind."
"Correct. And they correspond to: form, sound, smell, taste, touch, and mental phenomena."
"The sutras say there are six consciousnesses, but when evaluating jadeite, you only use your eyes. Isn't that foolish?"
"To truly understand a stone, you need more than just your eyes. Touch a finished piece, listen to it—experts can tell with their eyes closed whether something has been acid-washed and resin-filled. Tap a sliced piece, and you can tell if there are cracks. And the rind—you can't see enough detail with just your eyes. Experts feel the rind with their hands—one touch, and they know which mine it came from, roughly what era, where the cracks are, where the mold spots are, where the python patterns are."
"You're absolutely right." I nodded. "But smell and taste? You don't need to lick a stone or boil it for soup, do you?"
"Hahahaha!" Old Garrett roared with laughter. "I was waiting for you to say that!"
"You actually use your nose?" I was amazed.
"Smell it."
Could you really evaluate jade by smell? I leaned in close and took a sniff.
It smelled like dust and earth.
"No, no, no! Like this." Old Garrett demonstrated. He picked up a raw stone, pressed his nose almost directly against the surface, and inhaled deeply and forcefully.
I thought that if I smelled it the way he did, I'd basically be treating my nose like a vacuum—inhaling that much dust couldn't be good for your lungs. But I also admired how deeply someone could immerse themselves in studying stones. This was true dedication to truth.
"Smell it again," Old Garrett commanded.
Though it felt unhygienic, I steeled myself and inhaled deeply.
Huh!? I frowned. Upon careful sniffing, I detected a familiar, cool sensation!
"Ha, not bad, your nose works. Tell me—what is that smell? Should it be on jadeite?" Old Garrett threw the question back at me.
I'd already been puzzling over what the smell was and how it got on the stone. It smelled like menthol or toothpaste, possibly like medicated balm—definitely some kind of personal care product. Had a worker rubbed it onto the stone?
"Now take a tool and poke at the window area."
I found a date-pit-shaped carving burr, gripped it, and pressed it against the opened window. The first few pokes felt normal. But as I pushed harder, the jadeite inside actually gave way—a piece dented in!
My god! What was this?
Jadeite has a Mohs hardness of 6.5-7.5—how could it be poked in by a simple tool? There had to be something wrong.
"This particular stone has a fake that wasn't done carefully enough," Old Garrett explained. "If done well, the window area shouldn't be soft—your poke shouldn't be able to dent it."
"So what's inside? What soft thing is in there?"
"Toothpaste."
It dawned on me—cheap, green, and as translucent as ice-grade jadeite, toothpaste was the perfect material for counterfeiting.
Old Garrett pointed at the stone in my hand: "Here's how they do it with toothpaste. First, they open a small window on the raw stone. The window can be long, but it must not be wide."
"Then they take a slightly larger triangular burr and dig down along the window. They hollow out a space—if the craftsman is skilled, they can carve out quite a large cavity."
"And then they fill it with toothpaste?"
"Exactly. And they can't just fill it all at once, or it would be soft, like the one you just poked. The best fakes fill a layer, seal it with hard glue, then fill another layer, seal again, fill, seal. That way, you can't poke through to the soft part, and when you shine a flashlight through, the whole thing looks green, looks like ice-grade jadeite, and you might even spot what looks like a tiny crack—but it's really just layers of toothpaste."
Old Garrett continued, "And sometimes, certain flaws actually make a fake more convincing than its virtues. The green ice-grade quality makes you want to buy, but a visible 'crack' makes you think you've spotted a defect, so you negotiate a lower price and feel like you got a bargain. The counterfeiters have completely mastered the psychology of jade gambling buyers."
"That's terrifying!" I couldn't help but marvel. "This color looks genuinely premium."
"Yes. And if you buy it, cut it open, and discover the fraud, you go back to find the seller—and the person is gone."
I felt suddenly as though the stone was somehow dirty, and hastily put it back on the table.
Just like that, Old Garrett had eliminated one wrong answer for me.