Treat every piece of work with care and dedication.
The Road
Jadeite enters China the way it always has — out of the mines of northern Burma, over the mountains, into Yunnan. For centuries, Tengchong was the first stop on that road: the town where rough stone met the carvers who could read it.
Our great-grandfather learned the craft there, as an apprentice on that road. No machines, no laboratories, no certificates. To judge a stone you had only your eyes, your hands, and the men who had been wrong often enough to know better.
What he passed down
The eye — how to read a stone before the first cut.
Keeping the Craft
Then came the decades when nobody bought jade. The road went quiet. Workshops closed, carvers put down their tools, and a craft that had taken generations to build came close to being forgotten in one.
Our grandfather kept working stone anyway — in the slack seasons, at a small bench, teaching his son the way he had been taught. Not because it sold. Because a craft only survives if someone refuses to stop.
What he passed down
The craft does not break in our hands.
The Workshop
When the market finally returned, our father brought the family bench back to life — a proper workshop again, sourcing rough stone himself, carving, setting, answering for every piece that left his hands.
He never gave it a name. To him it needed none: the town knew whose work it was by the cut alone.
What he passed down
A working bench, and a reputation carried by the work itself.
Fourth Generation · 2008–Today
A Name, Written Down
In 2008, the fourth-generation successor did something none of their predecessors had ever needed to do: they gave the workshop a name—”YunCui”—signifying “Yunnan as the place of origin” and “the green of jadeite.” Although their craftsmanship standards had already been passed down through three generations, they now possessed a distinctive name that they had to live up to.
Then came the second thing no generation had done. For a hundred years everything lived in memory — passed at the bench, hand to hand, never written. In 2022, we put it all on paper.
《像行家一样买翡翠》 — Buy Jadeite Like an Expert. One hundred and six pages: how to read a stone’s zhong and se, how treated jade betrays itself, everything four generations learned the hard way — so that you do not have to.
The next chapter is in your hands.