Taiwan · Stone Carving / Lapidary
Taiwan Yu (台灣玉) — Fengtian Yu (豐田玉)
The cutting, grinding, and carving of nephrite jade sourced from the Fengtian deposit in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan — a craft with an extraordinary and improbable modern origin story. Nephrite occurring alongside asbestos deposits discovered by Japanese prospectors in 1932 was, at the time, dismissed as worthless waste rock and dumped in valleys during wartime asbestos mining; it was only in 1956 that Liao Hsueh-Cheng, a mining and metallurgy student, picked up discarded riverbed rock near Fengtian, ground it into thin laboratory slices, and identified it as jade — precipitating an industry that, remarkably, came to account for roughly 90 percent of the global jade market by the 1970s, with 1976 exports reaching NT$5 billion and over 1,000 tonnes of nephrite extracted annually between 1965 and the 1980s. This record joins the archive's existing Myanmar jadeite record (CRAFT-1940) and Guatemalan jade record (CRAFT-1817) as a third and structurally distinct global jade case: unlike Myanmar's continuously-worked deposit or Guatemala's centuries-lost-then-rediscovered source, Fengtian jade's raw material was sitting in plain sight the entire time, misclassified as industrial waste rather than lost or undiscovered.
Risk level: Vulnerable · Not Listed
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