BATTLING FOR BLOOD JADE

When the earth collapsed, as it does nearly every day in the jade hills of Myanmar, Ye Min Naing was poised on a steep slope of rubble and scree. It was a rainy night six months ago, at the tail end of the monsoons. A truck with wheels the height of a man had just deposited loose stones at the edge of the mountain, sending hundreds of scavengers scrambling through the tailings in hopes of finding a precious lump of jade.

Ye Min Naing heard the landslide before he saw it, a bass note that rattled his bones like thunder. Then a friend working near him was swallowed by a surge of earth. Ye Min Naing was buried too. “Up to here,” the 28-year-old says, making a slashing motion at his neck.

Somehow fellow wildcat miners pulled him out, along with a 19-year-old who was left paralyzed by the accident. Three people, Ye Min Naing thinks, were killed, but who really knows? Like many deaths in the mines of Hpakant township in northern Myanmar (once known as Burma), this accident never appeared in the media. No bodies were recovered. Most freelance miners in these hills, which produce nearly every piece of the world’s finest jade, are drug-addicted migrants, strangers to one another and lost to their families. In the months since the landslide, the mass of stony waste at Hmaw Sisar, where Ye Min Naing still forages, has only grown more perilous. “We don’t know who is buried in there,” he says.

Man and rock exist in inverse value in the Himalayan foothills of Myanmar’s Kachin state, wedged between India and China. The rock—a translucent mass of sodium aluminum silicate known as jadeite—is one of the world’s most coveted gems, chiefly among the Chinese, whose growing buying power has spurred record sales. The roughly 300,000 jade