I Visited a Working Jade Mine in Myanmar and It Changed How I See Jewelry

The truck lurched to a stop at 4:47 in the morning, and I could already hear it—the low, rhythmic thud of diesel generators echoing off limestone hills. We were somewhere outside Hpakan, a town in northern Myanmar that most people outside the gem trade have never heard of, and I was about to walk into a jade mine for the first time.

I'd been writing about gemstone sourcing for three years by that point. I knew the statistics. Myanmar produces roughly 70% of the world's jadeite, the harder and more valuable of the two minerals called "jade." The industry is worth billions annually. I'd read the reports about dangerous working conditions, about environmental damage, about the military's involvement in the trade. I thought I understood what I was walking into.

I was wrong.

Getting There Was Half the Problem

The journey started two days earlier in Mandalay, where I'd connected with a Burmese gem dealer named Ko Aung who agreed to take me to Hpakan. "You won't believe it," he told me over tea, tapping the table for emphasis. "You think you know jade. Then you go there. Then you know nothing."

He wasn't being dramatic. The road from Mandalay to Hpakan is roughly 350 kilometers as the crow flies, but it takes 14 to 18 hours depending on the season. During monsoon season—which was just ending when I visited in late October—large sections become impassable mud. We drove through stretches where the road was simply gone, replaced by rivers of brown water that came up to the truck's wheel wells. At one point, our driver got out to inspect a bridge that had partially collapsed the previous week. He decided we could make it. We did, but I didn't breathe for about thirty seconds.

Hpakan itself sits in a valley surrounded by steep, jungle-covered hills. The town exists because of jade and for jade. Every building, every road, every person is connected to the industry in some way. Even the tea shops display raw jade boulders in their windows, like other towns might display newspapers or menus.

The Mine at Ground Level

We arrived at the mining site just before dawn. Ko Aung had arranged access through a contact—foreign visitors aren't technically supposed to visit these sites without government permits, and the permits are, shall we say, difficult to obtain through official channels.

The first thing that hit me was the scale. I'd seen photographs, but photographs don't convey what it feels like to stand at the edge of an open-pit jade mine that's been carved into the side of a mountain. The pit we visited was roughly 200 meters across and at least 80 meters deep, with terraced walls that looked like something between a staircase and a wound in the earth. The walls were a mottled gray-white—the color of the limestone host rock—with occasional streaks of green where jade-bearing veins had been identified.

Workers were already moving when we arrived. Most were young men, probably 18 to 30, wearing flip-flops and thin cotton clothes that offered no protection against the rocky terrain. Some carried picks and shovels. Others operated small excavators that looked decades old. A few stood near the bottom of the pit, hosing water at the rock walls—a low-tech version of the high-pressure monitors used in larger operations. The water was meant to loosen the soil and expose jade boulders, but it also turned the pit floor into a soup of mud and runoff.

The noise was constant. Generators, pumps, the clatter of rock being broken, diesel engines. And underneath all of that, a low vibration you felt more than heard—the kind of sound that heavy earthmoving equipment makes when it's working hard.

How Jade Mining Actually Works

I'd assumed jade mining was basically like any other hard-rock mining: you find a vein, follow it, extract the material. The reality is more complicated and, in some ways, more primitive than I expected.

Jadeite doesn't form in neat veins. It occurs as boulders and lenses within a serpentine rock matrix, and the deposits are irregular—rich in one spot, empty a few meters away. There's no reliable way to know if a particular area contains jade without digging into it, which means a lot of the mining is essentially exploratory. You dig, you hope, you move on.

The open-pit mines like the one I visited use a combination of manual labor and heavy equipment. Workers dig into the hillside, creating the terraced pits I saw. When a boulder is exposed, it's inspected visually—experienced miners can sometimes identify jade by its surface texture and color—and then either extracted or left if it appears to be ordinary rock.

But the real gamble happens at the next stage. Rough jade boulders are almost impossible to evaluate from the outside. The skin of the boulder—the oxidized, weathered exterior—hides everything. A boulder that looks unpromising on the outside might contain translucent, vivid green jadeite worth millions. A boulder that looks beautiful on the outside might be mostly cracked, discolored, or low-grade material inside. The industry term for this is "gambling on jade," and it's not a metaphor.

I watched a group of miners huddle around a boulder roughly the size of a washing machine. They'd pulled it from the pit wall that morning. One of the older miners ran his hands over the surface, feeling for texture variations. Another used a small flashlight to check for translucency at a spot where the skin had chipped away. They debated in Burmese—Ko Aung translated fragments for me—and then one of them pulled out a circular saw with a diamond blade. They made a single cut, about three inches deep, into one corner of the boulder.

The exposed surface was a pale, mottled green. The miners' body language shifted immediately—shoulders dropped, the older one shook his head. Low grade. Probably worth a few hundred dollars at most, and it had taken most of a day to extract. That's the reality of jade mining: most of what you pull out of the ground isn't worth the effort it took to get it.

The People Behind the Stones

During a break, I sat with a miner named Tin Win—he gave me a name, at least; some of the younger workers didn't want to talk. He was 26, from a village in Sagaing Region, about 400 kilometers south. He'd come to Hpakan two years ago because a cousin told him he could make good money. "Good money" turned out to be about 15,000 kyat per day—roughly $7 to $9 at the exchange rate at the time—for ten to twelve hours of work, six or seven days a week.

"Is it dangerous?" I asked, already knowing the answer. The Kachin State mining region sees frequent landslides during rainy season. In July 2020, a single landslide at a jade mining site in Hpakan killed over 170 workers. It was one of the deadliest mining disasters in Myanmar's history, and it wasn't an isolated incident.

Tin Win shrugged. "Sometimes the wall falls. You have to watch. You have to be fast." He showed me a scar on his forearm where a rock had grazed him six months earlier. "This is nothing. My friend—he was standing next to me—one week, the ground just opened. He's gone."

I didn't know what to say to that. I still don't.

The miners I met weren't naive about the risks. They knew. They talked about landslides the way people in other professions talk about office politics—as an unpleasant but accepted feature of the environment. Most were there because the alternatives were worse. Agricultural work in their home villages paid less than half what jade mining paid. Factory jobs in Mandalay or Yangon were available but required leaving family behind for months at a time. Jade mining was dangerous, but it was also immediate cash in hand, every day.

The Middlemen and the Market

After the mining site, Ko Aung took me to one of the jade trading houses in Hpakan—basically a large concrete building with a courtyard where rough boulders were displayed on wooden platforms. Buyers walked around, inspected the stones, and placed bids. The atmosphere was quiet and tense, more like an auction house than a mining supply depot.

What struck me here was the social hierarchy of the trade. The miners who extracted the jade from the ground were almost entirely absent from this part of the process. The sellers were middlemen—people who had purchased boulders from mine operators and were now looking to flip them to larger buyers. The buyers represented companies in Yangon, Hong Kong, mainland China, and increasingly Thailand. The actual miners were invisible once the stone left the pit.

A Chinese buyer I spoke to (through Ko Aung's translation) told me he came to Hpakan three or four times a year and typically spent between $50,000 and $200,000 per trip on rough jade. He'd take it back to Shenzhen, have it cut and polished, and sell the finished pieces through his company's retail channels. The markup between rough stone and finished jewelry can be enormous—a high-quality boulder purchased for $10,000 might yield finished pieces worth $100,000 or more. The miner who extracted that boulder earned his daily wage.

What Changed in My Head

I flew home a week later with a small piece of jade—not gem quality, just a rough fragment that a miner gave me as a gift—and a brain full of things I couldn't stop thinking about.

The first was about visibility. When I wore jade jewelry before visiting Hpakan, I thought about how it looked. The color, the polish, the setting. After visiting, I can't look at a piece of jade without thinking about the pit it came from, the hands that pulled it out of the ground, the cut that revealed whether it was worth anything. The supply chain for jade is shorter than for most gemstones—mine to buyer to cutter to retailer—but the distance between the person who risks their life to extract it and the person who wears it as an accessory is enormous.

The second was about the word "ethical." I've seen a lot of jewelry marketing that uses that word, and I've written some of it myself. "Ethically sourced," "conflict-free," "responsibly mined." After Hpakan, those phrases feel thin. Not because they're dishonest, but because the reality they're trying to describe is so complex that a two-word label can't capture it. Is jade ethical if the miners chose to work there freely? What if "freely" means "because there's no better option"? What if the mine operates safely but the money flows through channels that fund armed conflict? There's no clean answer, and pretending there is does a disservice to everyone involved.

The third thing—and this is the one that really stuck—was about value. I watched a man spend the equivalent of two years of a miner's wages on a single boulder that might turn out to be worthless once cut. That's an extraordinary thing when you think about it. The entire jade industry runs on a kind of collective suspension of disbelief: a belief that the next cut will reveal something beautiful, that the next boulder will be the one that changes everything. Miners believe it. Buyers believe it. Cutters believe it. And somewhere at the end of that chain, someone wears a green stone on their wrist and never thinks about any of it.

I don't think that's necessarily wrong. But I do think it's worth knowing.