You've Inherited a Piece of Jade. Now What?

A bangle in a drawer, a pendant in a jewellery box, a carved figure that sat on a grandmother's shelf for forty years. Working out what it is takes a specific order of steps — and most people get the first one wrong.

Jade arrives in families sideways. It comes back from a posting abroad, or through a marriage, or in a box of things nobody sorted after a funeral. It rarely comes with paperwork, and the person who could have explained it is usually the reason you now have it.

So the question everyone starts with is the one that has to be answered last. How much is jade worth is unanswerable until you know what the object actually is — and with this particular material, that is a genuinely open question. Jade has the widest value range of any major gemstone, and the gap between the top and the bottom is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of whether you are holding one mineral, a different mineral, or neither.

Here is the order to work through it in.

Step one: don't test it yourself

This is the step that goes wrong, and it goes wrong because the internet is full of home tests.

Do not do the scratch test. The most commonly circulated advice is to scratch the piece with a steel blade or a coin to see whether it marks. This is bad advice for any inherited object. Nephrite sits at roughly 6 to 6.5 on the Mohs hardness scale and jadeite at 6.5 to 7 — high enough to resist steel in most cases, but not reliably, and not on a polished curved surface. If the piece turns out to be serpentine, marble, or a softer substitute, you will have permanently damaged the thing you were trying to identify.

Don't clean it aggressively, either. Polished jade is conventionally finished with a thin surface wax, and hot water, ultrasonic cleaners, and silver-dip solutions all remove or attack it. If the piece is set in tarnished silver, resist the urge to dip it — that solution is acidic and is hostile to stone, wax and adhesive alike. Lukewarm water and a soft cloth, and only after you've documented what you have.

The tests that are safe are the non-contact ones, and they are screening tools rather than answers.

Step two: document it before you do anything

Whatever happens next — valuation, insurance, sale, or simply keeping it — you want a record of the object as it came to you.

Photograph it in daylight against a neutral background, front and back. Then photograph it backlit, with a torch behind it, because translucency is the property that photographs worst and matters most. Measure it: for a bangle, the internal diameter and the width and thickness of the band; for a pendant or carving, height, width and depth. Weigh it if you can.

Then write down everything anyone in the family knows. Who owned it, roughly when it entered the family, where from, whether it was bought or given, whether there was ever a box, a receipt, a certificate, or a repair. This is provenance, and it is worth more than most people assume — both for insurance and for any future sale.

Do this before cleaning, before restringing, and before showing it to anyone who might offer to buy it.

Step three: narrow the category

Three broad possibilities, and it helps to know which one you're probably looking at before spending money.

Nephrite is the older material and the one that dominates Chinese cultural history — a calcium-magnesium silicate of the amphibole group. It tends toward a soft, slightly oily lustre, and colours from creamy white through spinach green to near black, often with a faint fibrous streaking visible when light passes through. Most Chinese carvings that came into Western families before the twentieth century are nephrite.

Jadeite is the Burmese material that arrived in China during the Qing dynasty and now dominates the top of the market — a sodium-aluminium silicate of the pyroxene group. It is more vitreous, capable of much higher translucency, and reaches colours nephrite cannot: vivid emerald, lavender, pale blue-green.

Neither is extremely common and worth taking seriously rather than treating as an insult to the family. Serpentine, dyed quartzite, aventurine, chrysoprase, glass and plastic have all been sold as jade for well over a century, in some periods openly and under regional trade names. A great deal of what sits in Western jewellery boxes labelled "jade" is one of these.

Two safe screening observations. Under a strong torch pressed against the stone, look for colour that follows fine surface cracks in a web rather than sitting in the body of the material — that pattern suggests dye. And look at the piece with a loupe where it's worn or drilled: bubbles indicate glass; a granular sugary surface can indicate quartzite.

Neither observation is conclusive. Both are useful for deciding whether the next step is worth taking.

Step four: age and form are evidence too

The object's style narrows things faster than most people expect.

Chinese export carvings made for the Western market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are a large and identifiable category. Art Deco jade jewellery — often jadeite, often in platinum with diamonds — is another. Archaistic pieces, made in later centuries in the style of much earlier ritual objects, are a well-documented tradition and not fakes in the pejorative sense.

If the piece is mounted, the metal carries information the stone doesn't: hallmarks, karat stamps, maker's marks, and the construction style of the setting can date a piece within a couple of decades. A jeweller can read these in five minutes, and it costs nothing to ask.

Step five: decide whether a laboratory report is worth it

This is the practical fork, and it's the part most articles skip.

A gemological laboratory report is not expensive relative to a valuable piece and is disproportionate for a modest one. Testing costs are broadly similar whether the object turns out to be fine jadeite or dyed quartzite — which means the decision depends on what your screening in steps three and four suggested.

It is usually worth testing if the piece is jadeite with good translucency or strong even colour; if it is a substantial bangle or a matched set; if it is going to be insured; if it is going to be sold; or if it needs to be divided fairly between people.

It is usually not worth testing if the screening points strongly toward a non-jade material, or if the piece is small, opaque and unremarkable — unless you simply want to know, which is a perfectly good reason on its own.

For jadeite specifically, laboratories in Asia are the reference standard, and the NGTC in China is the one whose reports carry weight in the regional market. Elsewhere, any established gemological laboratory can determine species and treatment. What matters is that the report carries a serial number checkable against the issuing lab's own database.

Step six: know exactly what the report will and won't tell you

This is where expectations most often break.

A laboratory can tell you the species — jadeite, nephrite, or something else entirely — and the treatment status. For jadeite that means the standard classification: Type A untreated, Type B acid-bleached and polymer-impregnated, Type C dyed. Those letters describe processing history, not quality, though the distinction matters enormously for value, because the polymer in treated material degrades over years regardless of care.

A laboratory cannot tell you where the stone was mined. Geographic origin determination, which exists in limited form for a few other gemstones, is not commercially available for jadeite in any meaningful way. It also cannot date the object, cannot authenticate a carver or workshop, and — this is the one that surprises people — does not give you a value.

A certificate and an appraisal are two different documents. The certificate establishes what the material is. An appraisal, from a qualified valuer, applies market judgement to that established fact, and will differ depending on whether it's written for insurance replacement, for probate, or for a realistic sale expectation. Those three numbers are not the same number, and confusing them causes a lot of disappointment.

Step seven: then, and only then, ask about value

Once you know the species, the treatment status, and the quality characteristics of the piece, the value question becomes answerable — not as a single figure, but as a position within a very wide and well-documented range.

That range is genuinely enormous, and it is stratified by factors that are learnable: material, treatment, colour, translucency, texture and craftsmanship. Understanding roughly where a piece sits across those variables is more useful than any single valuation, particularly for someone deciding whether to insure, sell, or simply keep something. A structured breakdown of jade price tiers by category and quality is the sensible thing to read at this point, once you know what you're holding.

And one closing note that has nothing to do with money. A significant proportion of inherited jade turns out to be modest material, and people are often visibly deflated by that. It's worth remembering that jade's place in the culture it comes from was never primarily about price. It was given at births, at weddings, at graduations, and at the opening of businesses, and it was worn daily for decades by people who never had it tested. Whatever the report says, the piece did the job it was given.