British Columbia jade

British Columbia is the world's largest producer of nephrite jade, with deposits documented at more than 50 sites, and jade has been the province's official gemstone since 1968. Jade is the name for two different ornamental stones, jadeite and nephrite, revered in China since the Stone Age, and BC's is nephrite, prized for its toughness and counted among the best in the world. Local First Nations have long prized it, and First Nations artists set it into the ceremonial Black Rod made for the Legislature in 2012.

The first active deposits were found at Lillooet, and from 1957 until the end of the 1960s the Lillooet area produced more rough jade than the rest of the world combined. Then came massive finds in the north, around Dease Lake, Mount Ogden and Cassiar, which the provincial government calls the global capital of nephrite. Nowhere is the stone more plentiful than in the northwest corner of the province, east of the Stewart-Cassiar Highway near Dease Lake. Some of it is mined from hard rock, some from placer deposits left by glaciers, and big boulders sometimes turn up by chance in the hands of miners looking for gold.

Jade City sits in the middle of it, on Highway 37 in the Cassiar Highlands, west of Good Hope Lake and an hour south of the Yukon border, about 19 hours' drive north of Greater Vancouver. Around 30 people lived there in 2015; there is no gas station and no restaurant, though a church opens for Sunday services in summer. The ground around it is rich in serpentinite, a jade precursor, greenstone that passes for jade, and nephrite itself. The Bunce family's Cassiar Mountain Jade Store has worked the area since Claudia Bunce's father, Steve Simonovic, began in 1985, and the reality series Jade Fever made their hunt famous.

By the government's 2016 figures, BC jade production had doubled in recent years, AAA stone had risen from $600 to $1,000 a kilogram since 2009, and 800 to 1,200 tonnes were sold abroad each year. The boom has a cost. The Narwhal reported that placer claims near Dease Lake, staked online under the province's free-entry system, were tearing up land in Tahltan territory without the Nation's consent, and Tahltan Central Government president Chad Norman Day flew in by helicopter to serve eviction notices. The ground is claimed and the stone belongs to the claim holders, so look for BC jade in the shops of Jade City rather than in the pits.