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THE STONE OF HEAVEN



The Independent (London)
July 2, 2001, Monday

MONDAY BOOK: MYANMAR - WHERE A MINER'S LIFE REALLY IS THE PITS;
THE STONE OF HEAVEN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF IMPERIAL GREEN JADE BY
ADRIAN LEVY AND CATHY SCOTT-CLARK (WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON, POUNDS 20)

BYLINE: Justin Wintle

IN JULY 1998, an extraordinary article appeared in the magazine section of 
The Mail on Sunday.
Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott-Clark had somehow managed to penetrate 
Myanmar's most guarded
site. In the heart of what used to be called Upper Burma, they had visited 
a complex of valleys where a
prized strain of jade was mined for the mainly Chinese market. But the tale 
they told was scarcely one of
simple extraction. At Hpakant, the callousness of the Rangoon regime was 
grotesquely manifest.

 From all over Myanmar, workers had been dragooned into a sealed system of 
profit and death. In a
sprawling shanty city wages were part-paid in heroin and the rest spent on 
prostitutes. Needles were
scarce (a solitary and illegal doctor estimated the share-rate as 800: 1) 
and condoms disparaged.
Among miners, a near-100 per cent HIV infection rate pertained. The few who 
escaped returned to
their villages to spread the virus.

The whole show was not only sanctioned but organised by the generals. The 
army provided the heroin
and licensed both shooting galleries and brothels. It also milked fat 
profits, either by mining the best
seams itself, or taxing Chinese entrepreneurs.

For serious Burma-watchers, all this was and wasn't a revelation. The 
authors' exposures tallied too
well with data filtering out of Myanmar, and with the growing acceptance 
that a regime that claimed to
be fighting narcotics was overseeing their manufacture. But what astonished 
and dismayed was the sheer
scale. Hpakant's floating, dying population was around a million.

How did Levy and Scott-Clark gain access? In The Stone of Heaven, they 
describe how, having been
blacklisted as journalists, they forged fresh credentials as gem 
prospectors and returned through the
front door. From there it was a matter of paying bribes: a scary ploy, 
given that no other Westerner had
been allowed near Hpakant, but one that paid off. Accompanied by a bullying 
English-speaking
corporal, they got to the mines.

This scoop is now expanded into the most damning chapters I have yet to 
read about Myanmar's
criminal government. Greed, oppression, corruption and concealment are the 
only instincts of Rangoon's
self-enriching militocracy. But the same chapters form only a quarter of 
the narrative, albeit the
culminating quarter. The bulk is given over to the extraterritorial story 
of Burma's "imperial green jade",
from the 18th century onwards.

Presumably, the purpose is to treat the reader to the largest possible 
tapestry of first oriental, then
Western, venality, as a way of showing why Hpakant exists. Levy and 
Scott-Clark take us on a
whirlwind tour of recent Chinese history. Cixi the Dowager Empress, Barbara 
Hutton and Madame
Chiang Kai-shek are just some of the ghouls who crowd their pages. But, as 
historians, their skills lag
way behind their talents as investigative reporters.

Mao Zedong was not a founder of the Chinese Communist Party, any more than 
foot -binding existed
during the Han dynasty. Cixi mounted her "charm offensive" against Western 
diplomats after, not before,
the Boxer rebellion of 1900. But if there are elementary errors, then so 
too do the broad brushstrokes
fail, beginning with the Chinese emperor Qianlong's foreign policy. While 
he may indeed have been
obsessed with Burmese jade, to infer that this was the overriding motive of 
his Burmese strategy is
mistaken. Rather, he pursued a well-established programme of shoring up 
China's landward defences,
and denying Ming loyalists space in which to operate.

Levy and Scott-Clark's vision of the past is speculative and tendentious, 
as though the bare mention of
jade were sufficient explanation. Conversely, sifting through forgotten 
archives in New Delhi, they do
shed light on early British activities in Upper Burma, while their wicked 
sketches of contemporary
dealers - Christie's and Sotheby's as well as less honoured names in Hong 
Kong and Taiwan - are
polemically valid. Compared, however, to their unquestionably heroic 
exploits in Hpakant, the surround
does less than justice to the stone.