Hualin Jadeware Street

This guide to Hualin Jadeware Street in Guangzhou follows the roughly three-hundred-year-old jade trade that runs through it, from a Qing-dynasty fair shut down in the Cultural Revolution and reopened in 1986. It traces how jadeite arrives by sea from Myanmar's Kachin hills and how pale nephrite is hand-fished from two glacier-fed rivers on the far side of China, the White Jade River and the Black Jade River. At the center of it all is a trader's blunt rule of thumb about what a cut-open stone usually contains, and a dealer's practiced way of showing you only its best face. Watch how a boulder gets turned before a price is named.