Green is the new gold for Canadian jade miner, once a Beijing banker
Alan Qiao hopes to strike it rich in the wilds of British Columbia - and he's become a reality TV star along the way
When Alan Qiao emigrated from China to Vancouver 17 years ago, the banker turned hotel management executive never imagined he would end up hunting for buried treasure in one of the remotest corners of the Canadian wilderness.
Qiao’s new life as the hammer-in-hand CEO of a jade-prospecting operation in Jade City, far northern British Columbia, bears little resemblance to his old office jobs back in Beijing. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Jade City is - different,” said Qiao, 52, speaking by phone from a business trip to Beijing. “At most, the population is 30, 35 people. Fresh air. No pollution. No government. No power – you have to use your own generators. So, no cell phones. It’s tough. But I love it.”
WATCH: Alan Qiao in Omnifilm Entertainment's "Jade Fever"
Qiao’s bid to strike it rich in the wilds of BC, working alongside a motley crew of hard-living Canadian prospectors, sounds like stranger-than-fiction stuff. The producers at Vancouver-based Omnifilm Entertainment saw the potential, and the result is “Jade Fever”, a reality show that is now six weeks into its first season on the Discovery Channel.
Qiao and a pair of fellow Chinese immigrants, Xiao Dong Qu and Chang Qi Yuan, have spent about C$6million on the mining project since 2012. The fourth director of Dease Lake Jade Mines Ltd is miner Claudia Bunce, whose father helped found the tiny hamlet of Jade City in the 1980s.
The community, which centres around Bunce’s Cassiar Mountain Jade Store, is made up of fellow jade prospectors and a few highway workers.
It’s the relationship between the Bunce clan and Qiao and his Chinese investors that helps provide a dynamic for the TV show.
David Gullason, the series producer, said the combination “means a strange mix of cultures millionaire investors from China wearing Rolexes [and] born-and-bred northerners on their home turf”. It is, he said, “a unique story on many levels”.
There are negotiations to bring the show to China’s CCTV state broadcaster, as well as discussions between Qiao and Omnifilm about a second season. But Qiao remains foremost a miner and businessman, not a reality TV star.
Qiao, who settled in Canada in 1998, said he first became interested in the business potential of jade via a cousin who was buying and selling Russian jade. He said he watched as the price of white jade from Xinjiang “jumped about 100 times” in 10 years.
“My cousin told me, ‘you know, there’s the same thing in your province in Canada’,” Qiao said.
In 2011 he found out about the Bunce family’s jade operations and he cold-called Claudia Bunce from Beijing. Initially he was only interested in buying jade from Bunce.
“So I told Mr Qu, ‘come on, let’s go and have a look at where this jade comes from’. We didn’t think we would be going into mining [at the time]...but then we found out there is a claim [for sale].”
With their third investor aboard, Qiao launched Kawah Venture and Investment Group, and bought out the existing Dynasty jade mine to create Dease Lake Jade Mines Ltd with Bunce.
Now, Qiao spends the May-to-October mining season at Jade City, nearly 1,900km north of Vancouver. The harsh weather at the site, just south of the Yukon border, makes work impossible the rest of the year.
Qiao said he loves the hands-on aspect of his work, as he checks the quality of jade boulders out in the field, armed with a hammer and a good eye. “That’s one reason I am so interested in the jade business,” he said. “My first job, I worked in a bank. Then I worked in the hotel industry more than 20 years. Always inside, in an office. This is the first job where I work outside, and I love it…we are not a big company, so if you want to know the jade, you have to know it on your own.”
His wife, Shirley, and their son and daughter still live in Richmond, just outside Vancouver, though all have visited Jade City “so they can see what Dad does”, Qiao said. He hopes his son will one day take over the mine, though Qiao concedes that his “city boy” found life in the wilderness “a bit boring”.
But it wasn’t so long ago that Qiao was a city boy himself, too. “When I first came to Canada, I never thought, ‘one day, I’m going to work outside, in the country, doing a miner’s job. I could never have thought that.”
Hunting for the ‘stone of heaven’
Canadian jade miner Alan Qiao tells a personal story that captures the mythic place that the “stone of heaven” occupies in the Chinese imagination.
“In China, people really believe that jade is good for your health,” said Qiao. “My mom, once she fell down on the ground, hard. She did not get hurt, but instead her jade bangle was broken. She really believed that this was what helped her avoid getting injured. She felt very lucky.
“This is just an example [but] many Chinese believe that jade is really good for your health, and also will bring good luck.”
Once associated with emperors, jade is now in huge demand from the booming Chinese middle class. But traditional Chinese reserves of jade, mainly from Xinjiang province, are running low.
Instead, British Columbia in western Canada now supplies 75 per cent of the world’s nephrite jade, according to the provincial government. Along with jadeite, nephrite is one of the two varieties of jade, with jadeite being the slightly harder. Both come in a wide range of colours, from milky white to brown, but are typically associated with a deep, translucent green.
Although the highest quality jade can cost more than gold, at thousands of dollars per ounce, the price of nephrite jade generally varies from C$10 (HK$63) to C$100 per kilogram as a raw stone, according to the BC Ministry of Energy and Mines.
Million-dollar jade boulders are a rare possibility, since some stones can weigh more than 10 tonnes.
Ian Young
