Ping!

So we all wandered through the jade factory past the workshop into a seating area. We were not that excited, as Leo had just walked us all over Antigua, and this part of the tour seemed pretty gift-shoppy. This big hippy-looking white woman showed up and told us we have to touch everything. She then took out a steel mallet and hit a rock with it, and said �jade.� The hammer bounced off the rock with a bright �ping.� She hit several other rocks with the mallet, and each time it bounced off, she said �jade.� Finally, she hit another rock, which absorbed the energy of the mallet; it just went �thud.� Not jade, just a rock.

Jade is super hard; which is why Asians and Mayans alike consider it to be a sign of permanence and eternity. Westerners think of diamonds; Asians and Mayans think of jade. To work with it takes something geologically harder; nowadays, they use dimond-cutting machinery to cut the jade. Workers use a lot of water and wear surgical masks to avoid dust.

Ok, she said, everyone has to hit the rock! So "ping!" I hit the rocks and put the mallet down.

She started giving us a geological and chemical explanation of jade and jadite and all the other kinds of jade and all the other kinds of fake jade, and we realized she was not just a tour guide. �Why isn�t anyone hitting the rock? You have to hit the rock!� Our group was trying to be polite, but she really wanted everyone to experience hitting the rock.

She showed us all kinds of samples, passed them out to us like they were candy. She insisted that we touch everything on all surfaces. The real jade was extremely heavy and had a glassy texture. The fake stuff was light and greasy. Her name is Dr. Mary Lou Ridinger; jade specialist and mine-owner. Her story appeared in National Geographic.

Then she told us the story. In the 70s, she went to Guatemala and asked around where all the ancient Mayan jade came from. The Guatemalans said, oh we took it from the Mayan tombs. And where did the Mayans get it? No one knew. On top of that, the Guatemalans did not believe there was any more jade left. They treated the archeologists like they were idiots for wanting to find jade in their country.

So Dr. Ridinger asked for government permission to look for jade; they laughed and said sure whatever, and even gave them the licenses for mining, processing, and selling.

Anyway, Dr. Ridinger found an ancient mine, and since none of the Guatemalans knew what to do, she bought it for herself. She kept looking though, because from the artifacts they knew that there were six sources of jadite. By 2004 she had found and bought all six.

By this point, we had all stopped to listen, and she told us to keep touching. Keep touching! Apparently, jadite dulls when it�s not touched; that�s why she insisted that we touch everything everywhere . . . especially in the gift shop; that deep bright shine comes from human contact.

She talked about some of the constraints she had on her business; she won�t sell raw jade to China or Japan since there�s so much fake jade there, the prices will go down; she employs Guatemalans at all stages in production and selling; like a good archeologist she insists that the work they do be replicas of the ancient Mayan work, not Buddha. Her company has become a blessing to the Guatemalan people who are employed by it and who benefit from the cultural revival.

On the tour through the museum, I asked her how I could tell the difference between real and fake jadite. She said that she was one of only 4 people in the world who can tell by sight. The reason why is that in the 70s she spent thousands of hours dropping jade samples into heavy liquids. After months of that, she realized she could start to tell by sight what was jade and what was not; she only dropped every other sample to make sure she was still on track; then every 5th sample, every 10th sample . . . .

When she tells people this, they cross themselves, because heavy liquids are highly toxic and you have to wear a gas mask nowadays to get anywhere near it; of course she just had it on her kitchen table with no protection.

Anyway, the funny part is that since she became able to tell jade by sight, she�s walked through many of the major museums of the world and identified all the fakes right through the display case glass. One way you could tell, she said, was that if it is behind glass and no humans are touching it, it starts looking like a crusty rock again. Jade has to be handled in order to shine; it takes a half an hour of casual touching for the shine to come back.

She said the worst was the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, one of the world�s greatest and most important archeological museums. The Aztecs demanded jade tribute from the Mayans, so there�s a lot on display there. Of course, the Mayans hated the Aztecs, so they sent them the fakest, cheapest, most brittle crap they could find. Funny! Now it�s in museum.

Anyway, Jades S.A. is her company: http://www.jademaya.com/. If you look on the internet, you�ll see that there were more characters in the Guatemala jade drama than just her, but the way she told it, it was all her. It�s a better story that way. Her granddaughter does some designing; as did Bill Clinton when he came to visit. He designed something nice for Chelsea. I asked if I could see a copy, but they were sold out at the time. They offered to cut another copy; it would take an hour. I declined politely.

Later, our tour guide took us to some ruins of 17th and 18th Century churches all over Antigua. Most people think they came down in one of the many earthquakes, but most are in ruins after being siezed and distroyed by a liberal government. All that's left is the facade, and usually the plaza in front, which the Guatemalans turn into a park with plants, trees, and benches.

Anyway, our guide was pointing out the stone work inside the churches, indeed more ornate and detailed than in Europe. Of course, our guide says, Guatemalan stone workers were used to working with jade; this stuff was nothing! So the stone columns have fine grooves in the ruins of churches.

Now the entire city is a UNESCO world heritage site, so the ruins stand as they are.