Skardu and Bunji Nephrite: How We Grade It, and Who Actually Buys It

A buyer from Guangzhou sent me a WeChat voice note last March asking, in a tired voice at 11pm his time, whether we could ship 800 kg of "top one" green nephrite before Qingming. He'd seen three photos. That was the whole pitch. We didn't ship — the lot he was looking at was actually a mid-grade parcel from a Bunji pit, and I wasn't going to let him find that out at customs in Shenzhen.

That's the jade trade in two sentences. Hot demand, almost no patience for due diligence, and a grading system that everyone references but nobody writes down the same way twice.

So here's how we actually classify the nephrite coming out of our Skardu and Bunji concessions, and where it lands in East Asian markets. This is the working note I wish someone had handed me four years ago.

The geology, briefly, because grade starts there

Our Skardu nephrite sits in serpentinite contact zones along the Shyok suture — classic tremolite-actinolite chemistry, similar in mineralogy to Hetian material from Xinjiang and to the better Russian Sayan deposits. The Bunji occurrences, about 180 km west along the Indus, are structurally related but the host rock there is more deformed, which gives us a different fracture pattern in the boulders. Bunji tends toward darker spinach greens with more black chromite inclusions. Skardu runs lighter — apple greens, occasional translucent white, and a small percentage of what the Chinese trade calls 羊脂玉 (mutton-fat) when we're lucky.

We've pulled boulders ranging from 8 kg up to one piece last winter that came in at 2,340 kg. Most of what moves commercially sits in the 40–300 kg range.

How we actually grade it

There's no ISO standard for nephrite. I used to think we could just adopt the Chinese national standard (GB/T 38821-2020) and be done with it. Then I realized buyers in Taipei, Seoul and Hong Kong all interpret it differently, and the auction houses in Beijing have their own internal scales. So we built our own grading sheet that maps to what buyers actually ask for.

Five tiers. Here's the working version:

Grade A1 — Carving stock, translucent. Hardness 6.0–6.5 Mohs, specific gravity 2.95–3.02, no visible fractures under torchlight at 30mm thickness, even color, fine felted texture under 10x loupe. This is maybe 3–4% of what we extract. Goes to carving studios in Suzhou and Jieyang. Last comparable sale I tracked: a 14 kg Skardu piece moved at roughly USD 1,840 per kg to a buyer through a Hong Kong intermediary.

Grade A2 — Carving stock, semi-translucent. Same hardness, minor inclusions allowed, color may have slight variation. Around 11% of production. Strong demand in Guangdong workshops.

Grade B — Bangle and pendant rough. Solid color, may have one healable fracture line, suitable for cutting into smaller finished pieces. The volume tier. Probably 35% of what we sort. Korean and Taiwanese buyers take a lot of this.

Grade C — Decorative and sculpture rough. Larger pieces with character — veining, color zoning, surface skin (the 皮色 that Chinese collectors actually pay extra for in some cases). About 28%.

Grade D — Industrial and tile stock. Honestly, a lot of this still finds buyers because nephrite tile and inlay for hotel projects in the Gulf and in mainland China is a real market. Roughly the remaining 23%.

We test every parcel ourselves before quoting — SG by water displacement, hardness by streak plate, and a basic FTIR check on disputed lots through a lab in Islamabad. Buyers can and should send their own QC people. Several have.

Where it goes, and what the buyers actually want

China is roughly 70% of our jade export volume, but it's not one market. It's at least four.

The Hetian-style buyers — mostly out of Xinjiang and Beijing — want our whitest, most translucent Skardu material. They're benchmarking against a domestic supply that's getting genuinely scarce. Hetian river jade production has collapsed since the 2007 mining restrictions, and high-grade Russian material got more expensive after 2022 sanctions complications. We've become a legitimate alternative for the mid-to-upper tier, not the museum tier.

Guangdong carving workshops — Jieyang especially — want consistent mid-grade green for bangles and Buddha pendants. Volume buyers. They'll take 2–5 tonnes at a time if the grading holds.

Taiwan still has a serious collector market for darker spinach greens, which plays well for Bunji material. Smaller orders, higher per-kg prices, slower payment.

Korea is the surprise. K-jewelry brands have been quietly sourcing nephrite for a couple of years now, mostly through Hong Kong traders, and the demand for pale green polished cabochon stock has been steady.

Japan is small but exists — mostly antique-replica and tea ceremony objects.

What actually slows deals down

Export logistics from Skardu aren't trivial. The road to Islamabad is 600+ km, the Karakoram Highway closes intermittently in winter, and customs classification for raw jade under Pakistan's HS code system needs a Gilgit-Baltistan mineral royalty clearance plus a federal export permit. We've got the licensing in place across all the relevant concessions — but a first-time buyer should budget 5–7 weeks from sale agreement to FOB Karachi, not the two weeks they sometimes expect.

The other thing that slows deals: buyers wanting to inspect in person. We encourage it. Skardu has an airport with flights from Islamabad, and we can host inspections at the yard. The buyers who've come up — three from Shenzhen last year, two from Seoul — closed faster and at better terms than the ones who tried to do everything on WhatsApp photos.

Which brings me back to that Guangzhou call. He flew up in May, looked at the actual parcel under daylight, and bought a different lot than the one he'd been chasing. Paid more, too, because what he saw in person was better than what the photos had shown.

That's usually how it goes with jade. The stone has to be in your hand.