Kathy Ding's Reviews > The Stone of Heaven: Unearthing the Secret History of Imperial Green Jade

Absolutely amazing. This book covers so much history, culture, myth and adventure that it was hard to get through quickly but boy, was it worth it. I learned so much about Chinese and Myanmar history in such stunning (and salacious!) detail! The mining trip to Myanmar was devastating but gruesomely educational. The plunder, theft and ransacking of Yuan Ming Yuan, Imperial tombs and the Forbidden Palace are described all with bitter accuracy.

Two quick corrections I have:
-shang you tian tang, xia you Su Hang = translated inaccurately because they forgot to include Hangzhou alongside mention of Suzhou.
-"fu-jen" is actually "fu-ren"
I really appreciated the note at the beginning where the authors differentiated between writing down Chinese into pinyin, Wade-Giles and Cantonese just to cover their bases.

My only critique is that the sources of their information were from shopkeepers, merchants, businessmen rather than scholars, historians, professors.