See the True Cost of Burmese Jade

4 minute read

For the Chinese, jade’s luster represents good fortune, prosperity and longevity. For impoverished Burmese toiling in squalid mines, it represents escape, or at least the dream of it.

The reality, as captured by Burmese photographer Minzayar Oo, is that as Burma emerges from a half-century of military dictatorship, with landmark general elections on Sunday, this precious stone is all about the Southeast Asian nation’s enduring misery.

“We have this rich natural resource but it is not helping the people at all,” Minzayar Oo, who made five trips to document Burma’s jade trade over two years, tells TIME.

Kachin state, the desperately deprived northernmost region of Burma (which is officially known as Myanmar), is the world’s foremost source of top quality jade. A single milky-green amulet from here can fetch tens of thousands of dollars in the swanky jewelers of Shanghai and Hong Kong.

In military-dominated Burma, though, virtually all this wealth is pocketed by cronies of the former junta and local rebel armies, with fierce battles fought for control of the best quarries. The precious stones are then ghosted across the porous Sino-Burmese border with the help of venal officials.

The illicit profits are enormous: New analysis by London-based NGO Global Witness put the size of Burma’s jade industry at $31 billion in 2014, equating to nearly half of national GDP and over 46 times the nation’s spending on healthcare. But the same year’s tax receipts from jade stand at just $374 million — representing not even 2% of production.

“Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” says Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba. “Local people suffer terrible abuses and see their natural inheritance ripped out from beneath their feet.”

Jade mining myanmar burma
A Chinese trader waits for customers in hotel room where he rents to keep the raw jade stones which are smuggled from Kachin State, at a hotel in Yin Jiang, China, June 2015.Minzayar Oo

Presidential spokesman Ye Htut told reporters on Oct. 26 that the Burmese government does not plan to respond to Global Witness’s allegations nor investigate its findings. And so the convoys of bright yellow diggers will continue to gouge the dark earth in search of mineral deposits.

Burma’s jade industry is split between military-aligned companies with government mining licenses, and the swarms of illegal miners “who, with little more than an iron rod and a pair of worn-out shoes, wander around the piles of rubble dumped by companies and look for stones,” says Minzayar Oo, whose work was supported by the Natural Resource Governance Institute NGO.

The 27-year-old photographer, a Rangoon native, is a regular visitor to the mining hub of Hpakant. A quarter of Burma’s 51 million population subsists on less than $1.25 a day, meaning young and old flock to this wasteland to eke out a hardscrabble existence.

With little oversight, workplace accidents are common; a single landslide can bury dozens of miners, especially during sudden monsoonal downpours, and there is the constant risk of arrest, assault and extortion by the police. Industrial waste imperils not just the miners but the wider community as well.

“When I first got there I was shocked by the vast landscape,” says Minzayar Oo, “and then I realized that this wasn’t actually natural but formed from piles of half-mined mountains.”

This desecration of nature extends to the miners themselves — typically gaunt from inadequate food, bent double from years of hacking through the flinty earth and all too frequently ravaged by drugs. Heroin abuse is endemic in mining communities, and grim shooting galleries, where miners swap a $2 lump of gleaming jade for a fleeting opiate glow, pepper the stark landscape. The scarcity of clean needles means HIV/Aids is rife.

“Without [heroin] I am very tired,” one addict tells Minzayar Oo. “But after the shot, I feel happy to work and I can chase my dreams again.”

Minzayar Oo is a photojournalist based in Rangoon, Burma. Follow him on Twitter @minzayar88.

Charlie Campbell is Associate Editor for TIME, focusing on Southeast Asia. Follow him on Twitter @charliecamp6ell.

Mikko Takkunen, who edited this photo essay, is the International Photo Editor at TIME.com. Follow him on Twitter @photojournalism.

Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Freelance miners search for jade on a pile of earth-waste which is dumped by a mining company, Hpakant, Kachin State, Burma, June 2015Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Small-scale miners search for stone as dump trucks from Myanmar Sein Lei Aung mining company dump waste in Hmaw Si Zar, Lone Khin, Hpakant, April 2015Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Dump trucks pass by near the Kyaing International company mining site, Sai Ja Bon, Hpakant, April 2015. Kyaing International company is widely known to be owned by the family of former military dictator Than ShweMinzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
A team of miners work in a jade mine. Some miners work alone while some like this young men here work by a team in a small plot land that is owned by their 'Lao-ban' (meaning 'Boss' in Chinese), Hpakant, July 2014Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
A group of illegal jade miners swim across the water as they try to escape an arrest by the police and the military forces, in a jade mining site, Hpakant, July 2014. Military officials say the miners are illegal and endangering a school located above. But the miners say they are being extorted for bribe money, which could be as much as 50,000 kyats ($40) per headMinzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
The feet of an illegal jade miner at work, Hpakant, July 2014Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Jade miners inject heroin at a 'shooting gallery' in the jade mining site. Heroin is almost openly available in Hpakant with jade miners lining up for a shot which is as cheap as 2,000 Kyats (about 2$), July 2014Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Jade miners rest inside their tents where they sleep to guard their mining plots from strangers as night falls, Hpakant, July 2014Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Miners with torchlights on their heads go over a pile of company mining waste, looking for jade. Hpakant, 2015Minzayar Oo
Jade mining Myanmar Burma
Seven-year-old Breng Aung and his brother who lives in a Kachin refugee camp in a Kachin baptist church in Lone Khin, wait as a jade buyer inspect the stone that they are trying to sell at the jade market, in Lone Khin, Hpakant, April 2015. They were trying to sell the small low quality stones for 2,000 kyats ($2)Minzayar Oo
A trader shows a jade stone which he estimates to be worth at least forty or fifty thousands U.S. Dollars in price in the black market, at a hotel room in Yin Jiang, China, June 17, 2015. According to the Myanmar jade traders of the black market, almost all the raw jade stones which are being traded in Yin Jiang are smuggled directly from the black market in Myanmar's land of jade in Kachin state where the billion-dollar industry is based in.Credit : Minzayar - NRGI
A trader shows a jade stone which he estimates to be worth at least forty or fifty thousands U.S. dollars in price in the black market, at a hotel room in Yin Jiang, China, June 17, 2015. According to the Myanmar jade traders of the black market, almost all the raw jade stones which are being traded in Yin Jiang are smuggled directly from the black market in Burma's Kachin state where the billion-dollar industry is basedMinzayar

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Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com