This book is one of a newly emerging genre: history told from the viewpoint of a single item. Other studies have already looked at subjects that ranged from flowers and foodstuffs (the tulip, the potato) to natural and man-made dyes (madder red, mauve). Generally they tell a tale of discovery, improvement and success. By contrast, "The Stone of Heaven," though it revels in luxury, ends as a journey to the heart of darkness.
Only one important mineral (salt) has been written up previously, so Levy and Scott-Clark's monograph is probably the first of this popular new kind to take up the story of a precious stone. Jade, however, is one of the most ancient precious materials: Examples of it in the Imperial Palace Museum in Taipei date back thousands of years, and readily attest to its central position in the cultural history of China. The catalog of the museum also reveals that there are different kinds of jade, as well as different qualities and colors.
The type of hard jade, known as jadeite, that this book examines was first imported into China in large quantities in the 18th century. It was a particular obsession of Emperor Qianlong, who was prepared to take his country to war to ensure its uninterrupted supply. The emperor composed poems to the stone, and had them inscribed on tablets of it. He even had older stones recarved, though the type that he preferred was not the softer jade, or nephrite, that had come in the past from central Asia, but jadeite from the mines in northern Burma.