Burmese Gemstone Mining & Buddhist Exploitation

This paper explores mining in Burma/Myanmar. With particular attention to the ruby and jade industries, this paper investigates the relationship between Burmese Buddhist imperialism and the exploitation of the environment and borderland communities in the Southeast Asian country. Myanmar has produced the world’s most valuable rubies, and Chinese courts have favored Burmese jade for centuries. These extraordinarily lucrative gemstones have ornamented powerful Burmese and Chinese ritual objects and enriched royal patrons of Buddhism. At the same time, mining practices have inflicted extreme harms on minoritized communities and non-human beings.

This paper examines the ways that Buddhist authorities have justified mining violence. It also considers the forms of solidarity that have resisted that violence. The primary sources for these histories include royal orders, public inscriptions, and ritual artifacts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This was the period when Burmese kings expanded the Buddhist kingdom to occupy all of modern Thailand and much of Laos, what is now the northeastern Indian state of Manipur, and Shan regions of southwest China. This is also the period when Burma’s gem trade went nearly global, as evidenced by ruby-encrusted regalia in Europe and jade incense burners in East Asia. The Burmese courts overseeing this trade promoted their power through royal orders and inscriptions that established themselves as bhumisamika, rightful owners of the earth, who used its treasures to support monasteries, build shrines, and preserve the Buddha’s teachings. These proclamations elaborated on Theravada karma theories in the stories they told about citizens who unearthed precious stones and their rights to keep those stones or their obligations to surrender them. They also included blunt language about the killing of minoritized people and animals in mining regions. This paper argues that these sources reveal a pattern of situating violence as a small demerit that is justified by a larger agenda of establishing Burma as the earth’s last remaining realm that protects the “pure” Buddhism (sasana). As the conclusion of this paper will address, this pattern of Buddhist violence has continued in the twentieth and twentieth centuries under the military dictatorship, especially in Kachin State, where civil warfare is still being waged and Myanmar’s government continues to use Buddhism to justify enriching itself with jade and ruby mining.

Jade and rubies prove particularly generative for the exploration of the intersections of extractive industries and religious history. Burmese Buddhist courts regularly employed brahmins who specialized in the particular powers of gemstones. These specialists drew on a long South Asian literary tradition that includes texts like the Brihat-Samita, an authoritative Indian encyclopaedia from the sixth century CE, that explains that excellent rubies are distinguished by their bright red color, heaviness, smoothness, fine shape, purity and brilliance. This text tells of a magical ruby that is found on the heads of serpents. A king who wears these serpent rubies will be protected from disease and poison, will receive divine rains throughout his realm, and will defeat his enemies. Even after the collapse of the last Burmese kingdom in 1885, Burmese governments have practiced forms of this gemology and related astrologies. In 1947, the Burmese government presented ninety-six rubies, one for each of the diseases that the human body can succumb to according to Burmese medical traditions, as a wedding gift to Queen Elizabeth II, who had it made into one of her favorite tiaras.

Likewise the religious history of jade powers its extractive industry. In China, jade has been more prized than gold and silver because of how it has been understood to possess transcendent powers. For thousands of years, Chinese communities have used jade (yu) for tools and ornaments, and they have understood the stone to have special powers and symbolic meanings. Confucius held up jade as a symbol of benevolence and intelligence, and fortune tellers use jade to predict good and bad luck. Imperial powers in Beijing and the most skilled gemstone carvers in Chinese workshops began favoring jade extracted by miners in northern mountainous regions of what is now Kachin State in the late eighteenth century. The rich green shades and semi-transparency of this particular Burmese jade were so prized in China that this stone became known as ‘Imperial Jade’. Chiefdoms once controlled these mining regions. Before the British colonial period, Kachin chiefs would allocate mining rights to numerous kinship groups in an effort to distribute their economic benefits widely. The Opium Wars between Britain and China (1839–1864) disrupted the overland jade trade routes between Yunnan and Canton. As Britain began annexing Myanmar—starting with the First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824–1826 and continuing with the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852–1853—the Burmese monarchy tried to raise funds for its collapsing kingdom through royal monopolies, including a monopoly on jade, which it justified through Buddhist karma theories and traditions of the king as bhumisamika.

This paper’s attention to Burmese gemstone mining seeks to contribute to current academic research into the relationship between environmental exploitation and religious systems. There is a burgeoning interest in extractive industries and their religious histories. Works like Robyn d’Avignon’s Ritual Geology: Gold and Subterranean Knowledge in Savanna West Africa (2022), Judith Ellen Brunton’s Pandemonium of Hope: Oil, Aspiration, and the Good Life in Alberta (2022), and Teren Sevea’s Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (2020) demonstrate the value of exploring how extractive systems shape and are shaped by religious practices and worldviews. This paper seeks to contribute an example from a Buddhist setting to consider what is and is not distinctive about the Theravada theologies and techniques employed by those benefiting from these industries.