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Sunstone Hunting in Tibet

By Jordan Clary, Colored Stone’s Travel Correspondent
Photos by Bob Clary

It was to have been the scoop of a lifetime—being the first reporter to visit Tibet’s new, much-ballyhooed andesine mine. There was only one problem: No one in Tibet had ever seen or even heard of it.

In 2006 when I was living in Hainan, China and first began freelancing for Colored Stone, former editor Morgan Beard sent me an email asking me if I could find out anything about the Tibetan sunstone. Purportedly from Tibet this red and sometimes green andesine had been making waves at the 2005 & 2006 Tucson Gem Shows, but no one was able to definitively pinpoint just where it came from.

An internet search turned up The Tibetan Sunstone Mine, owned by one Jackie Li, but multiple phone calls and emails received no response.

Since the owner of the mine was unavailable, I decided to go directly to the Tibetan people. Every winter, Tibetan craftsmen make their way to tropical Hainan Island to sell jewelry, prayer wheels, herbs and aphrodisiacs all up and down Guoxing Avenue in downtown Haikou. Surely, one of them would have heard something about an amazing new gemstone coming out of their own country.

For the next several weeks my friend, Quan, and I hit the pavement with a picture of a glimmering red “Tibetan sunstone” in hand. We might as well have been showing one of those “Have You Seen” pictures of a missing person.

A woman in traditional Tibetan dress with a Bob Marley T-shirt sells her wares at the street market.

At the market in Hainan.

Everything but the Gem

But what about Tibetan sunstone?

Several times a man or woman’s eyes lit up and they held out their wrist to show their dzi bead bracelet—a stone bead with black markings, also called a “sky stone” or “god stone” that was said to be left on the highest Himalayan peaks by the gods. Zhaxi said his had been passed down through several generations in his family. But the picture of the red andesine brought only quizzical looks and shrugged shoulders.

By summer I was mildly obsessed with the Tibetan sunstone. At this point I had heard the mine was near the Sichuan Province and Tibetan border, near the Qinghai Province and Tibetan border, in a remote area high in the Himalayas, along the border of China and Mongolia—and in the Congo! My husband and I packed our packs and headed for Tibet.

We traveled through Sichuan and Qinghai Provinces, along the Tibetan border, into Gansu Province, and north to Xingjian, talking to everyone we met along the way: shop keepers, street merchants, jewelers, geologists, hikers. They came from all over Tibet and China and none had ever heard of the sunstone or knew about a mine. We crossed into Mongolia and were shown human skulls elaborately carved into prayer bowls, rare jade and plenty of dzi beads. But no one knew anything about a mine or a dazzling new gemstone that was coming out of the region.

Back in the USA

When I returned to the U.S., I found Tibetan sunstone being advertised on both television and the internet. How could a gemstone make such a splash over here while the people who lived in the region it supposedly came from had never heard of it?

The author (far left) and translator (left center) search for sunstone.

Then I learned that it had been chosen as the “official” stone of the Olympics. Could it be? A little research showed that DSN (Direct Shopping Network) advertised red andesine as the “Number one gemstone in the world to represent the 2008 summer Olympics in China.” Yet China never endorsed it.

A YouTube video of Gemhunter Jack depicted a handful of either Chinese or Mongolians sifting through sand in what looked like the Gobi Desert. If this was the Tibetan sunstone mine, it assuredly is not high in the Himalayas.

In the past several months Colored Stone has been publishing the results of a study by Robert James that throws serious questions on the origins of red andesine/Tibetan sunstone. Yet, reports continue to arise that there really is a mine. The one consistency seems to be that you can’t get there.

I remember the night back in Haikou when Quan and I weathered the rainstorm under the bridge with Gesan Zhaxi. “Foreigners who come to Tibet don’t ever see it,” he said. “They go to Lhasa or maybe a nearby village, but that’s not the real Tibet. That’s another Tibet…” He faltered for a word.

“Disneyland?” I offered.

A lengthy translation followed. Finally Quan said, “Maybe.”

After spending nearly a year of my life traveling and talking to people from Tibet, I feel a personal connection to this mysterious stone. If it turns out that this find is just an elaborate hoax, the victims are not only those who bought the stone. It is also the people of Tibet whose mystique-laden country has been used as part of a global gem scam.

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