Nephrite Jade from Skardu and Bunji: What We're Actually Pulling Out and Who's Buying

Last month a buyer from Guangzhou sent me a WhatsApp voice note at 2am asking if I could get him 8 tonnes of spinach-green nephrite, blocks over 40kg, no black inclusions, delivered to Kashgar within six weeks. That's the jade market in one message. Fast, specific, and utterly unforgiving about quality.

So let me walk through what we're actually finding in Skardu and Bunji, how we grade it, and where it ends up. This isn't a gemology lecture. It's what I've learned running material to Chinese and Central Asian buyers over the last few years — and getting a lot of it wrong before I got it right.

The geology, briefly, because it matters for what you get

The nephrite in Gilgit-Baltistan sits along serpentinite contact zones — classic tremolite-actinolite mineralization where ultramafic rocks have been metamorphosed against carbonate or granitic bodies. Around Skardu we're working deposits near the Shigar and Basha valleys, and the Bunji occurrences sit along the Indus suture roughly 40km south of Gilgit town. Different host rocks, slightly different chemistry, noticeably different material.

Skardu tends to give us the greener, denser stone. Tighter felted texture under a loupe. The Bunji material runs more towards the greys, creams and mutton-fat whites that the Central Asian and Turkish trade actually prefers — and which honestly command better per-kilo pricing at the top end than most people in Pakistan realise.

Here's the thing most brokers won't tell you: the Karakoram nephrite is not Hetian. It's not trying to be. But the better Bunji white material has been mistaken for Russian Siberian nephrite at trade shows in Urumqi, and I've watched it happen. The mineralogy is close. The finish takes a mirror polish. What it lacks is 4,000 years of Chinese court history behind the name.

How we grade at the pit and at the yard

We run a five-tier system. It's not academic — it's what the buyers actually pay against.

Grade A (jewellery/carving grade): Even colour, no visible fractures under transmitted light, translucency of 8-15mm depending on colour, no black chromite spots larger than 2mm. Blocks 5kg and up. This is maybe 3-4% of what comes out of the ground. Prices from USD 180 to over USD 2,200 per kg depending on colour and block size. The mutton-fat whites from Bunji sit at the top of that range and honestly can go higher for exceptional pieces.

Grade B (small carving and bangle stock): Good colour, minor inclusions, blocks 2-5kg. Translucency 3-8mm. This is the workhorse — around 15% of production. USD 40-120/kg into the Chinese wholesale trade.

Grade C (tile, slab and decorative): Sound stone, colour variation acceptable, larger inclusions okay if they don't compromise structural integrity. Blocks 20kg to several tonnes for slab work. Prices USD 8-25/kg. Big volume here — this is where the architectural market lives.

Grade D (utility): Fractured, heavily included, but still workable for beads, small ornaments, tumbled stone. USD 2-6/kg.

Reject: Serpentinite that's too soft (below 5.5 Mohs), or nephrite so heavily fractured it won't hold a cut. We stockpile some of it because Turkish buyers occasionally take mixed lots for terrazzo aggregate.

Colour range across our concessions, roughly: deep spinach green (15%), mid to apple green (30%), grey-green and "celadon" (25%), cream and white (20%), yellow-brown and russet (8%), black nephrite (2%). The black is rare and the Taiwanese carving trade will pay silly money for clean pieces.

Where the material actually goes

China takes roughly 70% of what we ship. Not surprising. The Kashgar and Khotan wholesale markets absorb both raw blocks and rough-sawn slab, and from there material moves to Guangzhou, Sihui and Jieyang for carving. Our route is Skardu to Sost, over Khunjerab (weather permitting — the pass is realistically open May through October, and we plan around that hard), then bonded truck to Kashgar. Total transit 8-14 days from mine gate to Chinese buyer's warehouse.

The rest breaks down roughly like this: Turkey and Central Asia take about 12%, mostly the whites and creams for the Ottoman-revival jewellery and prayer bead trade in Istanbul. Germany and Italy take architectural slab — Milan has a small but consistent appetite for green nephrite as an interior cladding stone at the luxury end. Small volumes go to Taiwan, Korea and a growing but still modest Gulf trade for the mutton-fat whites.

One market I've been wrong about: the US. I assumed there'd be demand from the lapidary and mineral collector trade. There is, but it's tiny and the shipping paperwork isn't worth it below container loads. If you're a US buyer reading this, come in for a full 20-footer or work with a Chinese re-exporter.

The stuff nobody tells you before you buy

Royalty and export mechanics matter as much as the stone itself. GB charges royalty per tonne of extracted nephrite at rates the Mineral Department revises periodically — currently in the range of PKR 4,000-8,000 per tonne depending on grade classification at the checkpost. Export requires a Form-E from the State Bank, a GB Mineral Department export permit, and if the buyer wants CITES-style provenance documentation (some EU buyers now ask), we can provide chain-of-custody paperwork from pit to port.

And look — jade is not like copper concentrate. There's no LME price. Every block is negotiated. Two pieces from the same trench can differ 10x in value based on how the colour sits when you slice them. I've watched a buyer walk past a 60kg block I thought was our best piece of the month and pay four times more for a 12kg block I'd almost written off. You need experienced eyes, and honestly the best ones sit in Kashgar and Khotan, not in Pakistan.

If you're a serious buyer or a JV partner thinking about processing capacity in-country — a sawing and slabbing facility in Skardu is something we've costed and it's the obvious next step for capturing more of the value chain. Right now most of the margin sits with the Chinese cutters. That's a conversation worth having.

What's the block size you're actually looking for?