While in GuangZhou, we took a tour of the city via chartered tour bus. Part of these tours, as I have come to understand, is a little kickback the company gets for dropping their passengers off a certain shops and restaurants. For the most part, this is ok - you just need to keep a healthy amount of scepticism about you during these side trips.
To Note: The food has always been good. It'd be bad for business if your customers got sick on your tour...
So near the end of our tour, we were dropped off at a nice looking Jade shop to get a lesson in Jade (and hopefully, spend some money).
We were ushered into a room where an attractive looking lady starting explaining how to spot fake jade. We learned that vibrant green, plastic looking Jade was fake (duh) and that all red Jade was fake (duh, again). But before she could go further, the owner of the shop burst in and had an announcement for us all...
Seems he was from Burma, and his third wife just gave birth to twin boys a few days ago. But there was a problem. One of the boys was very sick and may not survive. So the owner went to the temple and prayed long and hard to the Buddha. What what the Buddha told him was that he could not sell anything for three days - to ingratiate himself back with the spirits of heath and long life. So he closed up shop for three days. This, the fourth day, his ill newborn son had recovered. And so in celebration, he had gifts for us all!
Carpe Carp. It gets better...
One of his employees entered the room carrying a basket of little red bags. In each bag was a little Jade disk (toroid, for the geeks out there). And it was marked at 650 Yuan (about $100). Seemed a bit high to me, but if its top-quality Jadeite, it would be worth it. So we were each given one for free. And he explains that he's already given away over 250,000 Yuan in Jade just today!
The fish is smelling a few days old now...
From there he ushered us into another room of his exclusive collection of Jade and Gemstones and proceeded to further explain the qualities of Jade and how to tell fakes from the real-deal - taking up where the lady had left off before (she was easier on the eyes, btw).
I'm not going to go into the full account of the qualities of Jade and spotting fakes. But if you are interested, here's a Wiki article on it: Jade
So, while the owner is explaining Jade, with us all from the tour bus crowded around him eagerly listening to his every word, he asks for one of the bags back so that he can demonstrate the qualities of authentic Jadeite. One guy in front, just happens to have his bag handy and gives it to the owner. Note: neither I nor my wife have seen this guy before on our tour, and its a small bus. So we are even more suspect and believe this guy is a plant.
The owner wraps the Jade in a single sheet of newspaper and tries to light it on fire. It won't burn. He explains that Jade is such a great conductor of heat that it pulls it away so fast that it can't get hot enough to burn. (Not sure about this one. Looked like a nice parlor trick to me).
He then takes the Jade disk and forcefully scrapes it right on the display cabinet's glass top. It easily scratches the glass. (This is true. High quality Jade will easily scratch glass).
All this is to prove that our gift from him is high-quality, authentic Jadeite (Although, the workmanship, IMHO, of our disk is not very good).
The fish is way past its expiration date now, but wait! There's more...
To further celebrate his newborn's recovery, he is slashing the prices of the Jade and Jemstone collections in the case behind him. From 6,000 to 10,000 Yuan, he is selling them to us for just 600 to 1,000 Yuan!
Well, another guy (that we've not seen before either) quite literately starts throwing his money out onto the counter demanding to by these hot items - shouting with excitement. Our Aunt, caught up in the moment (as anticipated) was about to do the same. We reigned her back in and explained the deception to her. Later that evening at dinner, we tried scratching glass with our little toroids of Jade - and of course, we could not.
That's not to say that what we got was not Jade. I believe it is. But it is a softer, lower quality, common grade of Jade and not the high-quality Jadeite that the owner purported it to be.
Back on the bus, most were laughing and joking about the show we had just witnessed. Others, well, they'd spent more that they should have...
Billy Mays would have been proud.
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