The name jade means red and green in Chinese, which is derived from the name of the jade bird. In ancient China, jadeite was a bird that lived in the south. Its fur color was very beautiful, usually blue, green, red, brown and other colors. But generally speaking, the male of this kind of bird is red, which is called "fei", and the female is green, which is called "emerald". Chen Zi'ang, a famous poet of the Tang Dynasty, wrote in his poem "Feelings of Encounter": "Emerald nests in the South China Sea, male and female pearl trees follow..., beautiful light jewelry, lush brocade quilt". In the Qing Dynasty, the feathers of emerald birds entered the court as ornaments, especially the green emerald feathers, which were loved by the imperial concubines. They put it on their heads as hair accessories, and used feathers to make jewelry. Therefore, the names of the jewelry made from them have the word "cui", such as "tin emerald", "zhu emerald" and so on. At the same time, a large amount of Burmese jade entered the palace courtyard through tribute and was loved by the noble concubines. Because their colors are mostly green and red, and are very similar to the feathers of the emerald bird, people call these jade from Myanmar jade. Gradually, this name also spread among the Chinese people. From then on, the name jade became The name was changed from the name of the bird to the name of the jade stone.
As for the discovery of jade minerals, according to the "History of Myanmar", in 1215 AD, Shanyupa from Menggong was named chieftain. Legend has it that when he was crossing the Menggong River, he accidentally discovered a piece of jade shaped like a drum on the beach. He was pleasantly surprised and thought it was a good sign, so he decided to build a city nearby and named it Menggong, which means Drum City. . This piece of jade was kept as a treasure for successive generations of chieftains, and this became the place where jade was mined later. There is a folk legend that says that the sun god gave three eggs to his daughter. When the daughter got married with the three eggs, jade, gems and gold were found in the place she married. This place is today's Menggong area.
Another legend about the discovery of jade originated in Yunnan. According to a book written by the Englishman Brown, jadeite was actually discovered by a horseman in Yunnan. It is said that Yunnan merchants traded with merchants from Myanmar, Tianzhu and other countries along the Southwest Silk Road, which has a history of more than 2,000 years. Once, in order to balance the weight on both sides of the horse's pack, a horseman from Yunnan picked up a stone on the roadside in the Mengong area of ??present-day Myanmar and placed it on the horse's pack on his way back to Tengchong (or Baoshan) in Yunnan. After coming back, I unloaded the horse and took a look. The stones I picked up on the way turned out to be emerald green and very beautiful. It seemed that they could be made into jade. After preliminary polishing, they turned out to be green and pleasant. After that, the groom went to the stone-producing areas many times to pick up the stones and brought them to Tengchong for processing. This incident spread widely, attracting more Yunnan people to look for this kind of stone, and then process it into finished products for sale. This kind of stone later became jade