"What the hell! What are you two doing here?" Boss U pressed both hands to his temples, looking thoroughly mortified.
Uncle Harvey hauled me up onto the bank and said to Boss U, "If you hadn't shown up, we'd have been shot."
"If you two die here, that gives me a massive headache too."
Boss U cursed in Burmese—again, I couldn't understand a word. Uncle Harvey didn't resort to his usual oily jokes to deflect. He was clearly preparing to confront things head-on.
"Don't worry, we're not here to die," Uncle Harvey said. "There are things I need to get to the bottom of. Until I do, I'm not going anywhere."
---
"Friend, you're really not going anywhere right now." Boss U's speech was still measured, but his tone had turned hard. "You two showed up at my mine. Until you tell me exactly why, you're not leaving."
"Dragon-stone jadeite."
Boss U's expression didn't change. "What about it?"
"I want to know—has your mine actually produced dragon-stone jadeite or not?"
"Then you already know the answer. Otherwise you wouldn't have rushed back here."
"I thought it had. Now I've changed my mind."
"What do you mean?"
Uncle Harvey looked Boss U dead in the eye and said, "I believe your mine has never produced dragon-stone jadeite."
Boss U shook his head. "Impossible. One was sold just last month. And yesterday one of the Yemuxi found another piece."
"Did you know that the dragon-stone jadeite coming from your mine is decades-old antique stock?"
Boss U was taken aback. "Antique stock? That can't be. How could they dig up something that old?"
Uncle Harvey massaged his forehead. "I'm saying I believe someone set this up—created the rumor that Kaqin is producing new dragon-stone jadeite to crash the price. In reality, no new dragon-stone 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 I was wrong about that."
"Why would I do such a thing? What's in it for me?"
"Spreading the rumor that Kaqin can produce premium material benefits your mine in lots of ways. And with that kind of reputation, everything becomes easier. Even if you decided to stop mining one day, the legend alone would boost the sale 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. The other mines are being closed too, one by one. So who would I sell to?"
Uncle Harvey said, "I've heard the closure rumors, but they've been circulating for years without any action."
"This time is different. This time they mean it."
"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 the mine was producing dragon-stone jadeite, 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 clothes and added, "We've both been played."
Then he explained the whole situation to Boss U—how Twin Gold Towers had sent them to investigate, and everything they'd seen and heard over the past few days. He left out only the part where we'd sliced open the wrapped stone and resealed it; everything else he shared in full.
After listening, Boss U still looked incredulous. He was silent for a moment, then said, "These people might actually have dragon-stone jadeite."
Uncle Harvey asked, "Then how did it escalate to soldiers firing guns?"
Boss U frowned. "I never intended that either. I just wanted to ask where they'd found the stones, so we could focus our mining there. I never imagined they'd protect their finds so fiercely today—none of them would even let us look."
Uncle Harvey said to Boss U, "How about I play mediator? Let's set aside today's confrontation for now?"
Boss U replied, "But until I get answers, I can't let these people go."
"No problem. But using force will only keep them huddled in the water. They won't cooperate. How will you find out who has the dragon-stone jadeite?"
Boss U nodded, gesturing for Uncle Harvey to continue.
Uncle Harvey waded into the water and pulled one Yemuxi worker out. He asked, "Why did you run?"
The man said, "I saw them with guns—I figured they were coming to take our stones, so I ran."
Uncle Harvey asked a soldier, "Were you ordered to seize stones?"
The soldier said, "No. Our orders were not to let anyone escape, so I chased."
The Yemuxi worker said, "So you chased, and I kept running."
The soldier said, "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 all of you come out of the water and bring your stones. We'll buy everything at the standard price plus fifty percent, and premium pieces at full price."
Hearing this, I finally understood. The Yemuxi boss must have been telling his workers that they'd found dragon-stone jadeite. These people now believed they were holding extremely valuable material and refused to hand it 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, experienced as ever, opened the trunk of his Hummer and produced two items: a wooden apple crate and a battery-powered megaphone. He set the crate on the ground and handed the megaphone to Uncle Harvey.
Uncle Harvey climbed on top of the crate and began addressing the Yemuxi like a leader.
"I guarantee everyone's safety!"
Every Yemuxi worker turned to look at him.
"Come out of the water slowly. Line up. No one will threaten you. No one will steal your stones."
Uncle Harvey pulled a thick stack of bundled euro notes—crisp and new—from his bag. Myanmar kyat notes had such low purchasing power that foreign currency was far more practical.
He held the money high in one hand and the megaphone in the other, shouting: "Jadeite! For sale! Now!"
Uncle Harvey's soaking-wet appearance was actually working in his favor. Just ten minutes earlier, he'd been in the same water as the Yemuxi. Now he stood on the other side, elevated on a crate, speaking to them in fluent and friendly Burmese. His wet clothes and longyi clung to his body like the shroud of a holy man come to redeem them—a proletarian medal that made the workers still in the water trust him implicitly.
The mine owner also ordered the soldiers to lift the blockade. The Yemuxi were free to bring their stones out to sell, on the condition that the mine had first right of purchase.
The raw stones were all small enough for one person to carry—no massive boulders among them. As they piled up on the ground, 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, clutched and guarded by desperate people, so they were now more or less washed clean—which made them easy to evaluate. They could barely still be called "Yemuxi" in the strictest sense.
Boss U also called in the mine's jadeite appraiser. The appraiser and Uncle Harvey, forming a formidable team, conducted an initial screening. The principle was simple: better to cut a wrong stone than to miss a real one. First they culled anything that clearly wasn't jadeite, then eliminated anything obviously low-quality. Everything else was marked for further examination. Boss U arranged for his people to advance the purchase money. What mattered most to us was getting these stones cut open as quickly as possible.
---
Back at Boss U's mansion—but this time not the guest reception hall. Instead, we went to a side room with bare concrete walls and floor. Inside was something astonishing: three massive rows of machinery. On the left, large and medium-sized cutting machines; down the center, at least a dozen small cutting machines; on the right, window-opening grinders, surface-polishing machines, and automated carving equipment—all the precision tools for finishing work.
This was a miniature factory. Workers were already cutting stones, and the room echoed with the harsh, reverberating noise of machines.
I only needed a glance to see that the cutting method here was completely different from how jadeite was sold in Ruili. There was no surface polishing, no window-opening, no test cuts—no exploratory procedure at all. Every piece of jadeite rough was sliced straight down the middle. One cut, two halves, the interior laid bare for all to see. Machine after machine, and every stone beside them had been bisected the same way.
In truth, cutting a stone in half was an overly aggressive approach, whether gambling or not. Suppose you sliced it and found nothing worth keeping—you might discard it, but what if the other half still held a pleasant surprise? Or say there was a patch right in the center, with excellent color, fine texture, and decent size—perfect for a pigeon-egg cabochon. If you bisected the stone right through it, you'd destroy the most valuable piece, and its price would plummet.
But at the mine, none of this seemed to matter. They were not short of jadeite!