Myanmar produces an estimated 70 to 95 per cent of the world's commercially significant jadeite jade, virtually all of it from the Hpakant township in Kachin State, in the country's far north. The trade is enormous: a 2015 report by Global Witness valued Myanmar's jade sector at approximately US $31 billion in 2014 alone — a figure equivalent to nearly half the country's official GDP that year. Yet the revenues flowing from Hpakant's mines have, for decades, been documented as a primary financial engine for the Tatmadaw (Myanmar's armed forces) and for various ethnic armed organisations, funding operations that have been associated with serious human-rights abuses, forced displacement, and protracted armed conflict. The term conflict jade — modelled on the earlier concept of conflict diamonds — describes jadeite whose extraction, taxation, or trade generates revenue that materially supports these actors. Understanding conflict jade requires engaging simultaneously with gemmology, political economy, international law, and the lived realities of communities in Kachin State.

The Hpakant Jade Fields: Geological and Commercial Context

Jadeite jade — the variety prized above all others in Chinese cultural tradition and commanding the highest prices in the global market — forms under conditions of high pressure and relatively low temperature, typically in subduction-zone settings. Myanmar's jadeite deposits occur within a serpentinite belt running through Kachin State, the product of tectonic collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates. The Hpakant–Tawmaw–Phakant area contains the densest concentration of jadeite-bearing boulders and primary rock known anywhere on earth.

The material ranges from low-grade htawt (commercial-grade green) to the translucent, intensely green, fine-grained jadeite known in the trade as Imperial jade — the most coveted and expensive variety, capable of fetching tens of millions of dollars per kilogram at auction in Hong Kong. Intermediate grades include fei cui (the Chinese term encompassing fine jadeite broadly), lavender jadeite, white jadeite, and the mottled green-and-black maw-sit-sit, a related rock type from the same region. The sheer breadth of the deposit, and the insatiable demand from Chinese consumers — who account for the overwhelming majority of fine jadeite purchases globally — make Hpakant one of the most economically consequential gemstone localities on earth.

Historical Background: From Royal Monopoly to Military Economy

Jade mining in the Hpakant region predates Burmese statehood by centuries. Under the Konbaung dynasty, the Burmese crown exercised monopoly control over the trade, taxing caravans carrying jade southward to Mandalay and onward to Yunnan province in China. British colonial administration formalised licensing arrangements after annexing Upper Burma in 1885, though enforcement in the remote Kachin hills remained limited.

Following independence in 1948 and the military coup of 1962 under General Ne Win, jade mining came under the nominal authority of the state. In practice, the remote geography of Hpakant meant that control was contested between the central government, the Tatmadaw, and the Kachin Independence Organisation (KIO) and its armed wing, the Kachin Independence Army (KIA). A ceasefire agreement in 1994 between the KIO and the military government opened Hpakant to large-scale commercial investment, and the 1990s and 2000s saw an influx of crony-linked conglomerates — many with direct ties to senior military figures — obtaining concessions across the jade fields.

The 1994 ceasefire collapsed in 2011, reigniting armed conflict in Kachin State that has continued, with intermittent pauses, to the present. The resumption of fighting did not halt jade extraction; rather, it intensified competition for control of the revenue streams the mines generate.

Revenue Flows and Military Financing

The Global Witness report Jade: Myanmar's 'Big State Secret' (2015) remains the most comprehensive public investigation of the sector's financial architecture. Its central finding was that the jade trade was dominated by a small number of conglomerates with documented links to the Tatmadaw, former military officers, and sanctioned individuals. Among the most prominent was the Asia World Company, founded by Lo Hsing Han — a figure long associated with the heroin trade in the Golden Triangle — and later run by his son Steven Law, who appeared on United States Treasury Department sanctions lists.

Revenue reaches military-linked actors through multiple channels:

• Concession fees and royalties: Companies operating in Hpakant pay licensing fees and production royalties to state entities, a portion of which flows to military-controlled budgets that operate outside parliamentary oversight.
• Taxation at checkpoints: Both the Tatmadaw and ethnic armed groups, including the KIA and various Shan militias, levy informal taxes on jade shipments transiting their areas of control. These payments are rarely documented and constitute a parallel revenue stream entirely outside formal accounting.
• Equity stakes in licensed companies: Myanmar Economic Holdings Limited (MEHL) and Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) — both military-owned conglomerates — hold direct equity positions in jade-mining ventures. A 2019 report by the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar identified MEHL and MEC as central pillars of the Tatmadaw's economic empire, generating funds used to sustain military operations.
• Informal artisanal extraction: Tens of thousands of artisanal miners, many of them Kachin and other ethnic minority workers, scavenge tailings and unstable waste dumps left by mechanised operations. They pay informal levies to whichever armed actor controls the immediate area, and their product enters the trade through opaque intermediary chains.

The UN Fact-Finding Mission's 2019 report on the economic interests of the Myanmar military explicitly named the jade sector as a significant source of off-budget revenue for the Tatmadaw, and called on member states and companies to avoid commercial relationships with MEHL and MEC.

Human-Rights Dimensions

The human cost of Hpakant's jade economy is documented across multiple dimensions. Forced displacement of Kachin communities from ancestral lands to make way for mining concessions has been reported by Human Rights Watch and the Kachin Women's Association Thailand, among others. Environmental destruction — including the collapse of enormous waste-dump slopes — has caused mass-casualty events: a landslide at a jade-waste dump in July 2020 killed at least 170 people, the majority of them artisanal scavengers, in what was one of the deadliest mining disasters in Myanmar's history.

The Hpakant area has also become a focal point of Myanmar's methamphetamine crisis. Researchers and journalists have documented the widespread availability of heroin and yaba (methamphetamine tablets) in mining camps, with addiction rates among artisanal workers described as catastrophic. The intersection of the jade economy with narcotics trafficking — both historically and in the present — adds a further layer of complexity to the conflict-resource analysis.

Following the February 2021 military coup, which overthrew the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, armed conflict in Kachin State intensified further. The coup also prompted renewed international scrutiny of the jade trade as a revenue source for the post-coup military administration, known as the State Administration Council (SAC).

International Sanctions and Import Restrictions

The United States has maintained import restrictions on Burmese jadeite and rubies since the Tom Lantos Block Burmese JADE (Junta's Anti-Democratic Efforts) Act of 2008, which prohibited the importation of jadeite and rubies mined or extracted from Burma, as well as jewellery containing such stones. The Act was motivated explicitly by the desire to deny the military government revenue from its most valuable gemstone resources. Following the 2021 coup, the United States Treasury Department expanded sanctions designations to include additional Myanmar military entities and individuals, and the Biden administration issued executive orders targeting the military's economic interests, including in the gemstone sector.

The European Union has imposed targeted sanctions on senior military figures and military-linked entities, though a comprehensive import ban on Myanmar gemstones equivalent to the US JADE Act has not been enacted at the EU level. The United Kingdom, following its departure from the EU, has maintained and in some respects extended its own sanctions regime against Myanmar military figures and entities.

Canada has similarly imposed targeted sanctions. Australia has imposed travel bans and asset freezes on senior military figures.

The practical effect of these measures on the jade trade has been debated. Because the dominant market for Myanmar jadeite is mainland China and Hong Kong — jurisdictions that have not imposed equivalent restrictions — the volume of jade reaching end consumers has not been substantially curtailed. The US JADE Act, for example, primarily affects the American market, which is not the principal destination for fine jadeite. Critics of the sanctions framework argue that without Chinese market participation in any accountability mechanism, import bans in Western jurisdictions have limited leverage over the overall trade.

Traceability, Certification, and the Limits of Due Diligence

Unlike diamonds — for which the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) provides a multilateral framework, however imperfect — there is no equivalent international certification mechanism for jadeite or other coloured gemstones. The Responsible Jewellery Council (RJC) has developed due-diligence standards for its members, and the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Supply Chains of Minerals from Conflict-Affected and High-Risk Areas provides a general framework applicable to gemstones, but neither constitutes a binding, product-specific traceability system for jade.

The traceability challenge for jadeite is acute. Rough jade boulders pass through multiple hands in Hpakant and Mandalay before reaching the emporiums where they are officially sold. The Myanmar Gems Emporium, the state-run auction held periodically in Naypyidaw, is the principal formal channel through which jade is supposed to enter export trade, but a substantial proportion of production is believed to exit Myanmar informally, crossing into Yunnan province through border towns such as Ruili (Shweli). Once in China, jade is carved, polished, and sold in ways that make origin verification essentially impossible without chain-of-custody documentation established at the point of extraction — documentation that does not exist for most material.

Gemmological laboratories, including the Gemmological Institute of America (GIA) and Gübelin Gem Lab, can determine through spectroscopic and chemical analysis that a given jadeite specimen is consistent with Myanmar origin, but they cannot determine the specific mine, the date of extraction, or the identity of the armed actors who may have taxed its passage. Origin determination and conflict-free certification are therefore distinct and non-equivalent forms of assurance.

The Kachin Dimension: Ethnic Conflict and Resource Sovereignty

Any serious engagement with conflict jade must acknowledge that the Kachin people — the indigenous inhabitants of the region containing the jade deposits — have derived minimal benefit from a resource extracted from their ancestral territory. The KIO and KIA have long argued that jade revenues rightfully belong to the Kachin people and that Tatmadaw control of the mines is an extension of the same colonial logic that has driven Kachin resistance since independence. This framing positions the jade conflict not merely as a corruption or governance problem but as a question of ethnic self-determination and resource sovereignty.

The KIA itself taxes jade shipments passing through areas under its control, a practice that complicates simple narratives of military versus civilian or legitimate versus illegitimate extraction. Multiple armed actors — including various ceasefire groups and Border Guard Forces nominally under Tatmadaw command — participate in the informal taxation economy around Hpakant, making the conflict-resource analysis considerably more complex than a binary military/civilian distinction would suggest.

Market Responses and Responsible Sourcing Debates

Within the jewellery industry, responses to the conflict-jade issue have been uneven. A number of Western jewellery brands and retailers have adopted policies declining to source Myanmar jade, citing both legal compliance with US sanctions and reputational risk. However, because fine jadeite is overwhelmingly sold through Chinese and Hong Kong auction houses and retailers — Christie's, Sotheby's, and Poly Auction have all offered significant Myanmar jadeite lots — the Western industry's self-exclusion has not materially altered the market's overall character.

The question of whether purchasing antique or vintage jadeite — material extracted decades before current conflict dynamics — raises the same ethical concerns as purchasing newly mined material is actively debated among ethically minded collectors and dealers. There is no settled consensus, though the argument that antique material does not generate new revenue for current armed actors has some logical force, provided genuine provenance can be established.

Following the 2021 coup, several major auction houses reviewed their policies regarding Myanmar gemstones. Sotheby's and Christie's both announced, in the months following the coup, that they would pause or restrict the sale of newly sourced Myanmar rubies and jade pending review of their due-diligence frameworks — a significant market signal, even if its practical effect on the broader trade remained limited.

Outlook

The conflict-jade problem is, at its core, a problem of political economy that gemmological expertise alone cannot resolve. The deposits at Hpakant are among the richest jadeite occurrences ever discovered, and the demand for fine jadeite — driven by deep cultural significance and growing wealth in China — shows no structural sign of abating. Until governance of Myanmar's natural resources is placed on a legitimate, accountable, and inclusive footing — a prospect that appears distant given the ongoing armed conflict following the 2021 coup — the revenues from Hpakant will continue to flow to armed actors rather than to the communities most directly affected by extraction.

For gemmologists, jewellers, and collectors, the conflict-jade issue demands a level of supply-chain awareness that goes beyond conventional origin determination. Knowing that a stone is jadeite, and knowing that it is consistent with Myanmar origin, is the beginning of the inquiry rather than its conclusion. The ethical dimensions of the trade are inseparable from its commercial and scientific dimensions, and any encyclopaedic treatment of Myanmar jadeite that omits the conflict context provides an incomplete and ultimately misleading picture of one of the world's most extraordinary gemstone resources.

Further Reading

• Global Witness — Jade: Myanmar's 'Big State Secret' (2015)
• GIA Gems & Gemology — Myanmar Jade, Ruby, and Sanctions
• UN Human Rights — Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar
• US Treasury — Burma Sanctions Programme