Cai Hongming saw Archibig's worries and explained to him.

When he came, he had already learned and knew that the places where jade was produced in Hotan were mainly concentrated in the two rivers of Yulong Kashgar and Karakash and their vicinity. Among the two rivers of Yulong Kashgar River and Karakash River, the Yulong Kashgar River produces the most jade, and the jade produced is mostly the top grade and the best in Hetian jade. The jade produced by the Karakash River is mostly green jade, green and white jade, blue and white jade and black jade, and a small amount of jasper is also produced, and the white jade produced is very small, and the texture and price of jade are far inferior to the white jade produced by the Yulong Kashgar River.

Hetian jade has a long history, as early as the Yin Shang period, has entered the Central Plains.

"The Biography of Mu Tianzi" records that King Mu of Zhou toured Kunlun and once "attacked its jade, took the jade version of the three vehicles, and carried ten thousand jades" and returned. In his "Tale of the Ten Continents in the Sea", Dongfang Shuo of the Western Han Dynasty called Hetian sheep fat jade "the essence of white jade".

It's just that after thousands of years of excavation, coupled with the use of modern machinery, the banks of the Yulong Kashgar River and the Karakash River have long been dug by jade miners.

Cai Hongming looked at it with a satellite map and found that the place had a hole on the left and a hole on the right, which did not look like a river at all. Just think about how it is easy to find jade in a place that has been dug up so much, so he wants to go up the river and follow the source to find jade.

There is a provincial-level highway in western Xinjiang built on the edge of the Yulong Kashgar River, and it is about 60 kilometers away from Hotan City before it begins to separate from the Yulong Kashgar River, turns into the mountains, and no longer walks along the river.

Cai Hongming wanted someone to drive them and the yak to the fork, and then ride the yak along the riverbank to find it. Find and count luck. It doesn't matter if you can't find it, just go play. When Archibiger heard his plan, he was relieved slightly. However, later, he secretly stuffed a gun for him to defend himself, so as not to have an accident. In this place, it is not as good as the mainland, everyone is a good citizen, so it is better to be careful.

Preparing the things, Cai Hongming and the others got up early the next day, and went to the jade search site together in Argibig's car and the truck carrying the yak.

After the snow melts on the Kunlun Mountain, it flows into a river, and there are rivers such as the Yulong Kashgar River, the Tarim River, and the Ili River.

Every summer. When the snow melts, it turns into snow water and rain that washes down from the mountains. Flash floods are almost always formed. The fragments of jade from the original jade ore on the Kunlun Mountains will be carried down into the river by the flood water after weathering and stripping, and the jade will be deposited in the river beach and riverbed due to the sudden decrease in the flow rate in the gentle area.

Year after year, it's the same.

Reputedly. Historically, due to factors such as crustal movements or natural disasters. The Yulong Kashgar River, one of the two major rivers originating from Kunlun, has been rerouted several times after forming a dammed lake. So. In the underground of Hetian, it can be said that there are almost all buried treasures.

Every year, when the temperature drops in autumn. The snow in the Kunlun Mountains no longer melts, the rainfall is greatly reduced, and the jade in the riverbed is relatively easy to spot when the river becomes shallow during the dry season.

Therefore, at this time of year, many locals and outsiders go to the river beach to look for jade. However, they only dare to be in the middle and lower reaches, because the upstream terrain is treacherous and difficult to reach. However, this phenomenon ended when white jade was found in the Black Mountain region (one of the birthplaces of seed jade). Many jade pickers began to venture forward in search.

Montenegro, known as Karang Quetak in ancient times, is one of the main peaks of Kunlun Mountain, with a peak of 7,562 meters, towering mountains, covered with ice and snow all year round.

The jade production site is in the Agjugai Valley, which is one of the tributaries of the Yulong Kashgar River, and some sections of the river are widely covered with ice deposits, mountain slopes collapse, and boulders are everywhere, which can only be reached by foot. There are glaciers above the snow edge here, and the altitude is more than 5,000 meters. To mine jade here, you not only need to face the hypoxic environment, but also be careful of the changeable climate of the high mountains, and you must always pay attention to it, be careful at all times, otherwise you will be in danger of dying at any time. It's just that in terms of relative danger, the harvest will be doubly rich.

Hetian jade is mainly divided into several types, one is white jade; the second is green jade and green and white jade; the third is jasper; fifth, black jade; Sixth, topaz.

And the so-called seed jade is actually the often said mutton fat jade. Sheep fat jade is a gem-quality material in Hetian jade, and it is the best pure color white in white jade, with the best luster and texture. Because it is warm and dense, transparent and pure, white and flawless, like clotted fat, the world calls it "mutton fat jade". The ancients thought that it had the five virtues of a gentleman, such as "benevolence, righteousness, wisdom, courage, and cleanliness", so mutton fat jade was very popular with the upper class in ancient times. Sometimes, the ruler even stipulated that non-emperors could not wear mutton fat jade; In the folk, mutton fat jade is regarded as a symbol of "beauty, nobility, auspiciousness, gentleness, and tranquility", and is widely popular.

Because of this, the price of mutton fat jade is so high.

According to the official 2012 jade price trading table, the price of each gram of top-grade sheep fat jade seed material is between 2-30,000 yuan, 1-20,000 yuan for high-grade and 8,000-10,000 yuan for high-grade jade. Although the market has been a bit volatile in recent years, it has also hovered around this price. It can be said that as long as you can find a piece of larger seed jade, you can get rich overnight. Such a high price makes countless people who are hungry for profit take risks. Therefore, in the Hotan area, almost every month, you can hear about people dying by mining jade.

However, compared with Hetian jade players in the circulation field and collection field, the income of jade diggers is somewhat insignificant.

Jade merchants and collectors can be said to benefit the most from the interest chain of Hetian jade, and good jade carving masters are even more profitable.

Because of the high profits, it has led to the prosperity of the Hetian jade market.

In the Hotan region, almost everyone is associated with Hotan jade. When you go to buy jade, sometimes you will see a 10-year-old child rushing out of the crowd, taking out a few jade stones, and bargaining with others. According to local estimates, there are at least hundreds of thousands of people in the Hotan area who use Hotan jade as an important source of income, including jade merchants and jade cutters in addition to jade diggers.

It's just that the prosperity of the market has also attracted the phenomenon of cunning people using shoddy products and fake ones. If you are not careful, you will be deceived.

Therefore, when buying jade, you must not be greedy for small gains, let alone believe their fabricated lies, poisonous oaths and stories. Someone said: "As soon as the people of the Central Plains swear, God laughs!" ”。 In fact, here, as soon as the Uyghurs swear, the Central Plains people laughed!

The car was speeding on the provincial road, and Cai Hongming looked out casually and found that there were many people looking for jade on the river beach. It's October, the river is almost out of flow, and the beach is out of the water, so it's a good time to pick jade.

After taking a closer look, he found that there were not only people, but also countless excavators and forklifts digging on the river beach in the distance.

Are they engaged in water conservancy construction? NO！ This is the person who contracted the river beach to use large machinery to dig jade.

It is said that at least 3,000-6,000 excavators are operating every day at the peak of jade digging on both sides of the Yulong Kashgar River. Now the Yulong Kashgar River has almost been dug upside down, but there are still people who are digging there without giving up.

When you see the pebbles, you know that it is a riverbed, and when you see the artificially piled "mountains", you know how many meters this place has been turned over. These are all "masterpieces" of excavators and bulldozers.

Although the Hotan city government has long been cracking down on indiscriminate mining, and has even mobilized troops to clean up the hundreds of kilometers of the Yulong Kashgar River, it has strictly forbidden anyone to mine jade in the river and on the riverbed, and has sent helicopters to inspect it. But after the troops withdrew, the jade diggers flocked to the place, and they couldn't ban it, and finally it was gone.

The reason why the jade diggers on both sides of the Yulong Kashgar River cannot be driven away is that interests are undoubtedly the biggest driving force.

Therefore, during the dry season in October every year, hundreds of meters of beach banks on both sides of the river are turned into quarries.

Here, it is a bit of a misnomer to use "digging three feet into the ground" to describe the depth of digging jade, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is thirty feet into the ground.

At this time, Cai Hongming saw one of the forklifts scooping up a bucket of pebbles, and a person standing on each side of the bucket, each holding a hoe rummaging through the pebble pile for jade.

That's hard work! However, where there is hope, there is power! Each of them has a salary of almost fifty yuan a day, and there is a commission for finding jade. If you can find jade, the harvest is still good. If you don't find it, fifty is not bad.

In the chain of interests of Hetian jade, jade diggers are undoubtedly the most difficult.

Here, tens of thousands of jade diggers are diggers every day, and they often have to invest a long time and cost to get a good piece of jade.

Gold is easy to get, but good jade is hard to find. It is no wonder that jade merchants are asking for such high prices, perhaps only they know that there are fewer and fewer good seeds, so the price is so expensive.

It has been said that people who play with stones are crazy! Maniacs sell, maniacs buy, and maniacs wait. Now the price of Hetian jade is getting more and more outrageous, only ten years, the price has jumped thousands of times, what a crazy stone!

PS: In the past few days, the New Year's goods have been basically done. I don't plan to go out during the Spring Festival, I will code words at home and strive for a little more code. (To be continued......)