Myanmar: Searching for Burmese Jade, and Finding Misery/Video Feature: Jade’s Journey Marked by Drugs and Death

Dec 1, 2014 | Dan Levin and Jonah M. Kessel, New York Times
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MYITKYINA, Myanmar — At 16, the gem trader’s son set out for the jade mines to seek his fortune in the precious stone that China craves. But a month in, the teenager, Sang Aung Bau Hkum, was feeding his own addiction: heroin, the drug of choice among the men who work the bleak terrain of gouged earthen pits, shared needles and dwindling hope here in the jungles of northern Myanmar.Three years later he finally found what he had come for — a jade rock “as green as a summer leaf.” He spent some of the $6,000 that a Chinese trader paid him on a motorcycle, a cellphone and gambling.