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Gem Hunting in Hebei Province, China
You are here: MineralCollecting.org >> Posted Articles >> Article 41

Submission Id No.: 200605240000003154
Submit Date: 2006/05/24
Submit Time: 22:06:54
Name: Steve McGrew
Email: stevem@nli-ltd.com
Article Title: Gem Hunting in China
Article Content:

Our gem hunting expedition began in a Beijing antique market in the Spring of 2003 and it carried us to the hills of Hebei Province in the Fall of 2005.

An outdoor antique market in Beijing is filled with everything from chunks of temple roof tiles to Chairman Mao buttons, from pottery to fossils, and from silk robes to carved wood panels. Of the two hundred or so vendors at the market, perhaps ten were selling fossils. Most of the fossils looked real enough: fossil fish, fossilized dinosaur footprints, fossil palm leaves. But a slightly skeptical eye could quickly see evidence of fakery: paint brush marks and ink lines for bones. Seeing identical, very convincing fossil fish on identical rocks at the booths of different vendors was the most glaring proof that it wasn’t safe to assume anything there was genuine. It seemed unlikely that any of the fantastic Chinese fossils we’ve been hearing about for the past decade could have found their way into an antique market, but why not take a look?!


Terrain near Fu Ping, Hebei Province, China, where we searched for gemstones

Unfortunately, the fossils in Chinese markets are almost all fakes. Imagine a fully articulated skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, fossilized in profile, forelimbs raised and jaws open – the whole thing 10 inches tall, selling for just 200 yuan (about 23 dollars)! But there were a few nice, genuine specimens of fossil brachiopods and small fossil fish.

Next to the fake-fossil booths, though, were several tables with ragtag displays of mineral specimens and rough semi-precious stones. Here was the real thing: rough crystals of green beryl, lavender amethyst, yellow tourmaline, pink ruby, gleaming gold pyrite and black feldspar. Big beautiful chunks of royal blue lapis lazuli, and radiant yellow tiger eye.

One particular vendor stood out from the rest. He didn’t call, “Hello, hello! Special discount!” Without speaking a word of English, he drew us in with his relaxed grin. He held a mineralogy reference book in his left hand and gestured with his right, pointing out specimens and matching them with photos in his book.

He knew exactly what each specimen was, and for each specimen he named the Chinese province it was from, sometimes saying the specimen was from a place sixty kilometers northeast of a particular city, or from the west side of a particular mountain. He told us he had collected most of the specimens himself.

It turned out that the vendor, Mr. Liu, is a professional mineralogist who makes his living collecting mineral specimens from all over China, then selling them to schools as teaching materials for geology and mineralogy courses. Every year he takes groups of university geology students for field trips into the mountains. On the side, Mr. Liu has a lapidary shop. He sells specimens at the antique market because he enjoys meeting and chatting with the people who shop there.

Mr. Liu sold me a nice ruby crystal for the reasonable price of 40 yuan (about $5) and explained to my interpreter that the ruby was from Hebei Province, just a few hours away from Beijing. Sapphires, rubies, quartz crystals, garnets and moonstones, he said, can all be found in the same area. After fielding a barrage of eager questions about the geology of the region and how he finds the stones, Mr. Liu offered to lead me on a gem hunting expedition to Hebei Province.

Could any real rockhound pass up such an offer? Not this rockhound! Two years later, in September 2005, Mr. Liu, Mrs. Nie (interpreter), Mr. Xiao (interpreter’s husband) and I set out for Fu Ping, a town in the middle of Hebei Province.

Through Mrs. Nie, Mr. Liu had explained that each of us needed to bring a strong but small backpack, a hat, some good hiking shoes, and suitable clothes including a raincoat just in case. I knew from previous trips to China that a few other items might be important in a remote area away from tourist stops. Even though they’re only a half day’s drive from Beijing, people in the mountains of Hebei Province haven’t seen foreigners since the Japanese occupied the region in 1940. Sanitation isn’t quite up to the standards of a tourist restaurant in Beijing! So, the sole foreigner in our expedition packed an emergency kit of pepto-bismol, Imodium, insect repellant, Benedryl ointment, Ibuprofin, antibiotic pills (Norfloxicin) prescribed by an understanding doctor back home, and a roll of toilet paper.

We met at a bus station on the edge of Beijing at the appointed hour of 8:30 am on September 8 and climbed on the bus to Fu Ping. During the four and a half hour bus ride, we pored over maps and mineralogy books as Mr. Liu pointed out where we would go for each of the next several days and what kinds of gemstones we should be able to find in each place.

We pulled into Fu Ping in the early afternoon. Fu Ping is a very small town by Chinese standards, with about 10,000 residents. A friend of Mr. Liu’s who lives in Fu Ping, met us at the bus station and drove us to the three-star hotel (all the plumbing worked, the walls and floors were clean, and the hotel staff could speak a bit of English) that we would use for our “base camp”.

At 3:00 after a quick lunch we headed into the mountains by car to a spot just 20-some minutes out of Fu Ping. After 15 minutes on a paved road and another 5 minutes on a gravel road, we were in a nameless village of 300 residents. In a few more minutes we were in a wonderland of tiny farm plots of potatoes, corn, rice, and squash; each plot a stair step, leveled for easy irrigation and surrounded by retaining walls of neatly fitted stones. Just beyond the village we we pulled onto a cow trail and parked between high, arid hills covered by low brush, wildflowers and sparse grass.

We climbed out of the car into 30 degrees C (85 Fahrenheit) air and 90 percent humidity. But with bottles of water in our backpacks and hats on our heads, we were ready to go! Mr. Liu handed each of us a geologist’s hammer and some specimen bags; and we clambered upwards on the steep hillside.


Some pieces of Hebei Province moonstone on the way to becoming jewelry

Mr. Liu pointed out a particular low thorny bush to avoid. Its thorns and the angles of the branches were arranged in the most malicious way possible, so that if Any unwary hiker who hooked the tip of one thorn in his jeans and kept moving was doomed: The thorns, angled as they are on thin zig-zag branches, are poised to wrap around the hiker’s leg and stab from all directions, tightening if he tries to pull away. After carefully disentangling the first bloodthirsty bush from its first victim, we had no trouble spotting and avoiding further thorn bushes!

Mr. Liu ran up the 45 degree slope of the hill with the energy and agility of a mountain goat, dodging thorns and clambering over granite boulders. About five hundred meters above us, Mr. Liu stopped and waited. When we caught up, dripping with perspiration, Mr. Liu pointed to an outcropping of metamorphosed granite. It was dotted with grey lumps about the size of a pencil eraser. The grey lumps, on closer inspection resolved themselves into the stacked hexagonal crystals characteristic of corundum. They were blue-gray sapphires.

Mr. Liu demonstrated an effective technique for extracting fist-sized specimens from solid granite boulders. He gripped a basketball-sized rock between his feet, placed the point of a steel spike about an inch from one edge, and gave the spike a sharp whack with the heavy, blunt end of a geologist’s hammer, knocking off a flake of rock the size of a child’s hand. Working his way in toward a selected crystal, he soon had a beautiful specimen ready to wrap in paper and place in his backpack.

We spread out to explore the outcropping and began filling our specimen bags.

After about twenty minutes, we climbed a few hundred meters more to the top and walked down over the other side. Mr. Liu pointed out inch-long black tourmaline crystals in the exposed rocks but kept us moving to a cliff about two hundred meters farther down the hill. There at the foot of the cliff was a large jumble of bushel basket sized granite boulders full of pale blue sapphire crystals.

In a broad swath on one end of the cliff face a rusty stain diffused through the rock. There, Mr. Liu pointed out beautifully faceted magnetite crystals the size of a large grape. Each magnetite crystal resembled a comic book artist’s rendition of an insectoid alien eye. Black mica chunks jutted out, punctuated intermittently by , and iron-stained reddish-colored, perfectly hexagonal stacked corundum crystals. These were rubies, half to three-quarters of an inch across and up to an inch long!

By the time evening arrived, we each had collected a big handful of loose sapphires and rubies, and a backpack full of crystal-with-matrix specimens. Hot, dirty, and sweaty, we headed back down the hill to our van and Fu Ping.


Sapphire crystal in granite matrix


Loose sapphire and ruby crystals

At the hotel we rinsed our treasures in water and spread them out to admire. You’ll never see so many sapphires outside of a gem wholesaler’s warehouse! We sorted them by size, by crystal perfection, and by color; illuminating their top faces with a flashlight and judging the color of the light that diffuses out from the interior. We divided them among us as equally as we could, put them away, cleaned up, and walked to the restaurant for a meal of Chinese greens, pig-knuckle and potato soup, rice, and green tea.

The next morning after breakfast we headed out to a more distant site, about 40 minutes out of Fu Ping. On the way we passed through a region with dozens of garage-sized shops using big disk saws to slice huge blocks of granite into slabs about 1.5 to 4 inches thick, then to cut the slabs into neat rectangular blocks destined for use in floors, sidewalks, and the faces of buildings in big cities. Broken chunks of granite slabs lined the roads and ditches, were dumped in haphazard piles, and composed rock walls. White rock dust covered everything.

In the mountains, empty trucks filled the road going one direction,; and trucks hauling those huge granite blocks clogged the road going in the other direction. At one point, on a long uphill grade in the mountains, the train of trucks came to a stop. Trucks in the kilometers-long line ahead of them had broken down.- and we couldn’t move any further, either. We found a brief gap in the stream of trucks heading downhill toward us, did a quick U-turn, and picked an alternate destination: Fu Ping Natural Bridge National Geopark.

The Geopark is not exactly wild country; it is an attraction for Chinese tourists. A path from the park headquarters roughly parallels a clear stream, passing a string of lovely waterfalls and climbing an endless stone stairway up a rocky gully. The hike is about three kilometers (two miles) long and rises about a thousand feet. At the bottom of the path wait groups of sturdy-looking young men offering to carry us up the path on an “emperor’s chair” slung between two bamboo poles. Somehow it looked safer to have our own feet on the ground! We walked.

All the way up the path, Mrs. Nie translated Mr. Liu’s running commentary about the geological features we passed, and about the processes that formed them. Mr. Liu pointed out how to tell the difference between metamorphosed igneous and sedimentary rocks, and showed us where the local conditions during rock alterations would have favored the formation of crystals. In large rock faces it was easy to see where, at some point in the rock’s formation billions of years before, the rock had re-flowed, carrying blocks of still-solid rock of slightly different composition. In those spots where the flow would have stagnated between large solid blocks, there were, indeed, pockets of obviously crystalline rock.


The first waterfall on the way up to the natural bridge in the geological park


Some typical stairs on the path up to the natural bridge

A 150-meter waterfall plunges through an opening under a huge natural bridge near the top of the path. The path goes over the natural bridge; and anyone who is nimble enough can climb down to the opening under the natural bridge and stand safely behind an iron railing right at the lip of the cliff.

On the far side of the natural bridge we bought one of the watermelons that some hardy and enterprising locals had carried up the path, using the Chinese traditional pole over the shoulder with two huge baskets dangling from the tips. The watermelon was well worth the exorbitant 20 yuan ($2.50) we paid.

By early afternoon we were back at the Park gates at the bottom of the mountain. Eager to get back to gem hunting, we ate a brief lunch and drove off in another direction. This time, our goal was to find moonstones. We drove through a tiny village of mountain farmers and alongside a creek bed until the trail ended. We got out and headed up a brush-filled draw, toward the nearest ridge about a quarter-mile away.

Halfway up to the ridge, we spotted what looked like dried raspberries littering the ground. Looking closer, we saw that they were garnets. Mr. Liu smiled, nodded and moved over to a rock outcrop about 50 feet away. We followed. There, glittering in the sun, lay a two-foot thick vertical vein packed solid with pea-sized garnet crystals! Mr. Liu explained that we would need to dig a few feet through the rock to get to high quality garnets. He said the moonstones were to be found another kilometer or two higher in the hills. If we stopped to excavate for garnets, we wouldn’t have time to reach the moonstone site. Reluctantly, we agreed to continue on up to the moonstones.

Mr. Liu must be part mountain goat. He’s 29 years old, about 5’9”, slim as a marathon runner, and glowing with health and enthusiasm. He had run up all the stone steps that morning and skipped most of the way back down on one foot. On the trek to the moonstones over loose, flaky rock up a steep slope for several kilometers in the heat and humidity, he seemed tireless and we never saw a bead of sweat on his forehead.

The other three of us were soaked and gasping by the time we reached the top, but it was worth every bit of effort. Just below the top of the hill was a six-inch wide layer of moonstone slicing through the hills, tilted about five degrees from horizontal. Mr. Liu knocked some chunks off with his hammer and explained how to recognize a top-quality piece of moonstone. The moonstone in that locality can be very clear, faintly bluish with a bright, crisp “cat’s eye” flash. We spent about a half hour, each gathering more than 15 kilograms of treasure.


Garnets in a two-foot thick vein

That evening Mr. Liu took us on a tour of a tiny village nearby, the village where he had lived as a child. Many of the villagers kept a pig or two in rock-walled “apartments” carved into the ground; practically everyone had a garden plot at their home as well as a farm plot in the hills. Villagers who had never seen a foreigner followed us, pushing their bicycles or carrying their babies. Children stopped to stare at us in wonder. We met a tiny little bent over 90-year old woman who could hardly see or hear, but who understood that she had a foreign visitor. Never have you seen such a beautiful, welcoming smile!

I stayed for one more day while Mrs. Nie and her husband took the bus back to Beijing.By that time, Mr. Liu and I had worked out enough sign language and “Chinglish” that we could converse freely about our mutual interests: rocks, minerals and gemstones. Mr. Liu showed me his collection of favorite mineral specimens in the one-room lapidary shop he had built in his father’s house near his childhood village.

He showed two Chinese classic style half-meter tall stone lions he had carved from basalt, and an 8-centimeter tall Buddha he had carved in agate. He demonstrated his lapidary tools and technique, showing how to reveal the cat’s eye in moonstone and star sapphires. Mr. Liu’s father, a wizened and joyful 57-year old gentleman who makes his living finding mineral specimens and growing peanuts, proudly showed me tangerine-sized magnetite crystals he had found, beautiful specimens of moonstone and quartz, and an assortment of other minerals he had gathered from the area.

That last day Mr. Liu, his father and I searched for, and found, quartz crystals and pink moonstone. The quartz crystals were in patchy veins threading through the dry hills, sometimes in thick clusters and sometimes scattered widely on the ground. Most were small, an inch or two long and less than a quarter of an inch thick; but a few were large, clear and beautifully formed. Mr. Liu and his father described a site a few hundred kilometers away where they said there are huge quantities of quartz crystals as big as your arm, inches thick. Every promise Mr. Liu had made so far had been kept, and every claim had been proven true; so there is no reason to doubt that those giant quartz crystals are where he says they are, waiting for whoever is lucky enough to go with “Mountain Goat Liu” and “Papa Liu” on their next expedition there.


Mr. Liu’s father holding a beautiful specimen of Hebei Province moonstone

Mr. Liu collects mineral and gem specimens from all over China, and has done it for the past ten years. He’s got secret sites that nobody else on Earth knows about. Star garnets occur in China (not only in India and northern Idaho, contrary to popular rockhound wisdom), and Mr. Liu knows where they are. Beautiful green cat’s eye apatite? He knows where to find it.

On the way back to Fu Ping Mr. Liu said that he would enjoy conducting more gem hunting expeditions for rockhounds and amateur mineralogists from the USA. Over dinner we discussed the logistics. We decided to organize one expedition in September 2006 for about a dozen seasoned rockhounds and see how it goes. If there’s enough interest, we’ll try for more in following years. Should the gem hunters who go swear to keep the locations secret? Probably. The locations are precious, not only because of the mineral treasures they hold, but also because of the incalculable value of being one of the first foreigners to visit those places, meet those people, and experience the fast-vanishing wonders of rural China.


A pig’s life in a Hebei Province mountain village

If you are interested in joining the September 2006 gem hunting field trip to Hebei Province, please email the author:

Steve McGrew Email: stevem@nli-ltd.com


Right to left: mineralogist Mr. Liu, the author, Mr. Liu’s father and Mr. Liu’s mother in a village outside of FuPing, Hebei Province, China

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