"Oh, no! What are you two doing here?" Boss U pressed both hands to his temples, looking mortified.
Uncle Harvey pulled me up onto the bank and said to Boss U, "If you hadn't come, we almost got shot."
"If you two die here, that's going to give me a massive headache too."
Boss U muttered a string of Burmese that I couldn't understand. Uncle Harvey didn't crack any of his usual jokes to lighten the mood—he was clearly preparing to confront the situation head-on.
"Relax, we're not here to die," Uncle Harvey said. "There are things I need to figure out before I go anywhere."
---
"Friend, you're really not going anywhere right now." Boss U's speech was still measured, but his tone had hardened. "You two came to my mine, and you still haven't told me why. Until you do, don't even think about leaving."
"Dragon-stone type jadeite."
Boss U's expression didn't change. "What about it?"
"I need to know whether your mine is actually producing dragon-stone jadeite."
"You already know the answer. Otherwise, you wouldn't have rushed back here."
"I thought it was producing. Now I've changed my mind."
"What do you mean?"
Uncle Harvey looked Boss U dead in the eye. "I believe your mine has never produced dragon-stone jadeite."
Boss U shook his head. "Impossible. One was sold last month. And yesterday, a Yemuxi found another piece."
"I need to ask you—do you know that the dragon-stone material coming from your mine is decades-old antique stock?"
Boss U was clearly startled. "Antique stock? That can't be right. How could they dig up something that old?"
Uncle Harvey rubbed his forehead. "I'm saying that I believe someone has set this up to create the rumor that Kaqin is producing new dragon-stone jadeite, which would crash the price. In reality, no new dragon-stone jadeite has been mined."
"That's you Chinese jade merchants' business. What does it have to do with me?"
"I suspected you might be the one behind the scheme, but now I see that was a mistake."
"Why would I do that? What's in it for me?"
"If you spread the rumor that Kaqin can produce premium material, it benefits your mine a lot. And with such good fortune, everything becomes easier. Even if you decided to sell the mine one day, the reputation would boost the price."
"Don't you know, Old Harvey?" Boss U said coldly. "My mine has two and a half years left. After that, the Myanmar government is shutting it down. Other mines are being closed too, one by one. So who would I sell to?"
Uncle Harvey replied, "I've heard the closure rumors before, but they've been circulating for years without any action."
"This time is different. This time they're serious."
"Regardless, I believe you. And I'm asking you to believe me too."
"You said you don't suspect me anymore. Why should I believe you?"
"Because of this." Uncle Harvey pointed at the soldiers' rifles. "If you knew dragon-stone jadeite was being found on your land, would you break the rules and send armed men to steal from the Yemuxi? When I saw how far this had escalated, I knew you'd been played too."
Uncle Harvey wrung the water from his shirt and added, "We've both been played."
Then he explained everything to Boss U—how Twin Gold Towers had sent him to investigate, and everything we'd seen and heard over the past few days. He left out only the part where we'd sliced open the wrapped tape and resealed it; everything else, he shared in full.
Boss U listened, still looking incredulous. He was silent for a moment, then said, "These people might have actually found dragon-stone jadeite."
Uncle Harvey asked, "Then why did it escalate to soldiers firing guns?"
Boss U frowned. "I didn't expect that either. My intention was simply to find out where they'd found it, so we could focus our mining there. I never imagined they'd protect their stones so fiercely today—none of them would hand anything over."
Uncle Harvey said to Boss U, "How about I play mediator? Let's set today's events aside for now?"
Boss U replied, "But until I get answers, I can't let these people go."
"No problem. But using force will only make them stay in the water. They won't cooperate. How will you find out who found dragon-stone jadeite?"
Boss U nodded, signaling Uncle Harvey to continue.
Uncle Harvey waded into the water and hauled one Yemuxi worker out. He asked, "Why did you run?"
The man said, "I saw them holding guns—I figured they were coming to steal our stones, so I ran."
Uncle Harvey asked a soldier, "Were you ordered to steal stones?"
The soldier said, "No. Our orders were not to let anyone escape, so I chased them."
The Yemuxi worker said, "You chased, so I kept running."
Soldier: "You ran, so I kept chasing."
"That's enough, that's enough." Uncle Harvey cut them off. "Here's what we'll do. Go tell your brothers that we guarantee everyone's safety. Now, everyone come out of the water and bring your stones. We'll buy everything at the standard market price plus a fifty percent premium. Premium pieces get full market price."
I understood now. The Yemuxi boss had probably been telling his people that they'd found dragon-stone jadeite. The workers now believed they were holding tremendously valuable stones and refused to hand them over, which was why they'd retreated into the lake.
With the Yemuxi boss nowhere to be found, this disorganized mob was in chaos, shouting and confused. Boss U, an experienced hand, opened the trunk of his vehicle and produced two items: a wooden crate and a battery-powered megaphone. He set the crate on the ground and handed the megaphone to Uncle Harvey.
Uncle Harvey climbed onto the crate and began addressing the Yemuxi like a leader.
"I guarantee everyone's safety!"
The Yemuxi all turned to look at him.
"Come out of the water slowly, line up in an orderly fashion. No one will threaten you. No one will steal your stones."
Uncle Harvey pulled a thick stack of bundled, crisp euro notes from his bag. Myanmar kyat had such low purchasing power that euros were far more practical.
He held the money high in one hand, megaphone in the other, and bellowed: "Jadeite for sale!"
Uncle Harvey's soaking-wet appearance turned out to be an unexpected asset. Ten minutes earlier, he'd been in the water alongside the Yemuxi. Now he stood on the other side, high up on a crate, shouting in fluent and friendly Burmese. His wet clothes and longyi clung to his body, but it was as if a redeemer had arrived wearing the shroud of the people—it gave him a credibility with the workers still in the water that no amount of money alone could buy.
Boss U also ordered the soldiers to lift the blockade. The Yemuxi could bring their stones out to sell, with the understanding that Boss U's operation had first right of purchase.
The raw stones the Yemuxi had were all small enough to carry—they weren't massive boulders. As they piled up on shore, Uncle Harvey went through them with his flashlight.
The name Yemuxi literally meant "unwashed by water," but these stones had been soaking in the lake and clutched by desperate hands, so they were now more or less washed clean—which made evaluating them much easier.
Boss U called in the appraiser. The appraiser and Uncle Harvey, working as a team, conducted an initial screening of the raw stones. The principle was simple: better to screen out incorrectly than to miss something. So first, they eliminated anything that clearly wasn't jadeite, then anything obviously low-quality. Everything else was marked for further examination. Boss U arranged for his people to advance the purchase money, and what we were most anxious about was cutting these stones open as quickly as possible.
---
Back at Boss U's mansion—but this time, not the guest reception room. Instead, we went to a side room with bare concrete walls and floors, containing something astonishing: three massive rows of machinery. On the left, large and medium cutting machines; in the center, a row of at least a dozen small cutting machines; on the right, window-opening grinders, surface-polishing machines, and automated carving equipment—every kind of finishing tool.
This was essentially a miniature factory. Workers were already cutting stones, and the room echoed with the harsh, reverberating noise of machinery.
I noticed immediately that the cutting method here was completely different from what I'd seen in Ruili. There was no surface polishing, no window opening, no test cutting—no preliminary exploration at all. Every piece of jadeite was sliced straight in half. One cut, and the interior was immediately visible. Several machines were already working, and every stone beside them had been bisected the same way.
In truth, cutting a stone in half was overly aggressive for jadeite, whether gambling or not. If you sliced it and found nothing attractive, you might discard it—but what if the other half still held a pleasant surprise? And if there was a perfect cabochon-sized patch right in the center, bisecting it would destroy the most valuable piece, reducing its worth enormously.
But at the mine, this didn't seem to matter. They had jadeite in such abundance!
Aside from the three rows of machines, every wall and corridor was stacked with burlap sacks and wire cages filled with jadeite raw stones of all sizes. There were even piles of cutting scraps—the kind of small broken pieces that could sell for a hundred or two in Ruili, or command prices in the thousands at Beijing's Panjiayuan antique market—just sitting in corners on the bare floor.
Among all this material, the small batch of "suspected dragon-stone" that Uncle Harvey had selected was like a single grain of rice in an ocean.
Boss U immediately ordered his workers to start cutting the raw stones. The pieces were quickly distributed. Boss U's personal attention meant the workers moved with extra urgency. The stones went onto the machines, and everyone held their breath.
During the cutting process, nothing is visible. But inexperienced people like me, or Uncle Harvey's clients, always liked to watch. The anticipation made it feel like staring might somehow reveal the outcome sooner. What was truly worth watching were the expressions on people's faces.
Uncle Harvey's expression suggested he already knew the outcome—he looked less interested in the cutting than usual. Boss U stood straight as always, but his face betrayed obvious anxiety. After all, this was his mine, his fortune, the thing he'd broken the rules to pursue.
Stones were cut, one after another.
Split one open. Nothing inside.
Next one. Kilogram-grade material.
Next one. Some spring color—not it.
Next. Decent texture and transparency, but far from what they were looking for.
Next piece. Water jadeite—not jadeite at all.
Another one. This one had color, but it wasn't right.
Another. Floating patterns—not it either.
Finally, the batch of stones purchased from the Yemuxi produced zero dragon-stone jadeite. Not even anything that could be called "relatively top-grade." Boss U stared at the last two halves of stone, said nothing, and walked silently out of the room. Uncle Harvey sighed and followed.
Boss U stood on the cliff edge overlooking the entire mine and lit a cigarette. Uncle Harvey went to offer a light, but after being soaked, his lighter wouldn't catch. He searched his pockets—no other lighter. Boss U gave up.
He said quietly, "Next month, I'm closing this mine. I'll start shutting down the equipment in a few days."
Uncle Harvey said, "That's extreme. Even without dragon-stone jadeite, the mine is still worth operating. Kaqin is an old pit."
Boss U: "I turned on my own miners and broke-the-rules of the trade. No Yemuxi will ever come back here."
"No Yemuxi, but the machines can still mine on their own, can't they?"
"It's pointless. The mine looks busy, but it hasn't produced good material in a long time. I think the jadeite is running out. We've dug left, and nothing. We've dug right, and there's less and less."
Uncle Harvey nodded.
Boss U sighed and sat down right there on the cliff, continuing to gaze at his mine.
"I wanted to make one last push. I really, desperately wanted to find out where the dragon-stone was coming from. This mine—my grandfather worked here as a laborer. In his generation, conditions were terrible, no heavy machinery, everything by hand. But they found dragon-stone jadeite. I wanted to restore the glory of my grandfather's era. In these last two and a half years, I wanted to find dragon-stone!"
"Your grandfather found dragon-stone jadeite?"
"He didn't actually find it himself—it was his coworkers. When my father was young, our family was very poor. But after my grandfather passed away, they relocated the workers' quarters. And when they demolished my grandfather's old quarters, they found a huge piece of jadeite—green, ice-grade, over a hundred kilograms. My grandfather spent his whole life sleeping right above a treasure trove, just a few meters underground, working so hard, digging hundreds of meters into the mountain, and never found it."
"Ah," Uncle Harvey sighed. "In Chinese, we call that fate mocking you."
"My whole life has been like this. No more mining. The wisdom of fate isn't something humans can understand."
"You're really shutting it down?"
"The government's shutting down all the mines in 2022 anyway. I'm going home to rest, spend time with my wife and kids. Maybe I'll learn to carve jadeite like you. I still have plenty of jadeite! Hahahaha."
They both laughed. Boss U's laugh was very manly.
I saw a tear roll down his cheek.
The tear hit the ground and was instantly absorbed into a tiny ball of dry earth.
This mine was so thirsty, so harsh, so exhausted. A thought struck me—if they really shut it down, would new green growth cover this barren mountainside in ten years? Maybe, right next to the lake where we'd been, a tree might grow.
We returned empty-handed. Uncle Harvey and I were heading back to Ruili.