Jade market or Mahar Aung Myay, in Mandalay, is one of my fulfilled traveller's dream. You can spend the whole day here watching how raw stones are cut an polished into semiprecious gems.
On the outskirts of Mandalay, the whole market, covering a few tens of thousands of square meters is dedicated to Jade business. Trading stones, cutting and turning them into gems and jewellery is a daily bread of this city in a city. The market has its own ecosystem of tea, snacks, restaurants and entertainment. The most important thing here is the conversion of unsightly black boulders into beautiful semi-precious stones and jewellery from them. Here you can observe the whole process or take part personally.
In the beginning, you, or the investor, buy a crap stone. Stone is black from outside and nobody knows what is inside. Just a cat in a bag. You can hire an expert on the valuation of cats in the sack, alias raw jade, which will help you choose a promising stone for a small fee. It's like buying a watermelon. Until you cut, you have no idea what's inside.
If you want to reduce the risk of throwing away your money, you can already buy a stone cut in half. As with melon, you can already guess what to expect from him. It will be a little more expensive.
After cutting the rock in half, a highly expert assessment of what can be extracted from it starts to cut out. Bracelets made out of one piece of jade are valuable. The most expensive was offered for $ 100. What a super price directly from the manufacturer. They were from a very strange jade where the shades of pink and white prevailed over standard green.
Work begins on large saws as if sawing wood and ends with a fine-tuned sander size dental drill. You can request anything to be cut from your jade piece.
