2018 Award Finalist: Minzayar Oo, The Price Of Jade - Invisible Photographer Asia (IPA)

Freelance miners work on a rainy day. It is a perilous job especially when banks and slag heaps are destabilized by monsoon rain. Landslides routinely swallow 10 or 20 men at a time. In April 2015, a deadly landslide in a company mining site killed at least 11 people reportedly. According to the witnesses, the unofficial toll could be even higher by double or triple. Hpakant, Northern Myanmar, June 2015.

A team of small-scale miners work in a jade mine, Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, July 18, 2014. Some miners work alone while some like this young men here work by a team in a small plot of land that is owned by their 'Lao-ban' (meaning 'Boss' in Chinese), who is often a local trader.

Small-scale miners search for stone as dump trucks from a government-licensed jade mining company dump waste in Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, April 25, 2015. Jade mining is a perilous job for small-scale miners especially when banks and slag heaps are de-stabilized by monsoon rain. A massive landslide in November 2015 at a government-licensed company waste-dumping site reportedly killed 114 people.

A group of young jade miners rest inside their tent where they sleep to guard their mining plots from strangers as night falls, Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, July 23, 2014.

A government-licensed company's jade mining site in Hpakant, Kachin State, April 29, 2015. A 1994 ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and Burmese military brought most of the jade land back under government control. Since then, large-scale extraction has began, with hundreds of backhoes, earthmovers and trucks working around the clock, leaving the traditional freelance prospectors to become illegal miners by the law. The company pictured, according to a recent report by Global Witness, is connected to politically influential tycoons but the group’s origins, ownership and operations remain obscure. “Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” says Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba. The report by Global Witness put the size of Myanmar's jade industry at $31 billion in 2014, equating to nearly half of national GDP and over 46 times the nation’s spending on healthcare.

Jade miners inject heroin at a 'shooting gallery' in the jade mining site, Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, July 13, 2014. Heroin is almost openly available in Hpakant with jade miners lining up for a shot which is as cheap as 2,000 Kyats (about 2$). Drug-use is almost intrinsic to jade mining as these ‘shooting galleries’ operate openly in the mines. According to local community leaders, the drug-dealers around the jade mines and the villages nearby have been given the opportunity to grow, blind-eyed by local authorities who regularly gets handsome bribes from the drug-dealers. But local civil society communities have stood up by themselves against this, cracking down on these ‘shooting galleries’ with the help of the religious leaders and the volunteer-based public forces.

Miners with torchlights on their heads go over a pile of company mining waste, looking for jade, Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, April 25, 2015. Some miners work by day while others work by night but the mines never get a rest around clock.

Chinese traders negotiate at a shop which deals raw jade stones smuggled from Myanmar through the border. Yin Jiang county, Yunnan Province, China, June 17, 2015. According to several Myanmar jade traders of the black market, almost all the raw jade stones which are being traded in Yin Jiang are smuggled directly from the black market in Myanmar's land of jade in Myanmar's Kachin state where the billion-dollar industry is based. If a trader wants to smuggle a raw jade stone from Hpakant to China directly, the trader has to hand the stone to a carrier or a 'jockey' who will then go through the jungle route through Kachin to China. The trader will then pick up the stone in Yin Jiang county in Yunnan Province near the border with Myanmar. According to a Reuters special report on jade in 2013, half of all Myanmar's jade sales are "unofficial" - that is, spirited over the border into China with little or no formal taxation. This represents billions of dollars in lost revenues that could be spent on rebuilding a nation shattered by nearly half a century of military dictatorship.

The funeral of 24-year-old Ko San Tin, a freelance jade miner who died being run over by a jade mining company dump truck, Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar, November 28, 2015. The next day, angry locals blocked the village road stopping the company trucks to pass through. The company quickly made an agreement with Ko San Tin's family for a compensation and closed the case. Ko San Tin who has just been in Hpakant for five months, left a 2-year-old, a wife and parents who he was supporting for.

A trader shows a jade stone which he estimates to be worth at least forty or fifty thousands U.S. Dollars in price in the black market, at a hotel room in Yin Jiang, Yunnan Province, China, June 17, 2015. According to several Myanmar jade traders of the black market, almost all the raw jade stones which are being traded in Yin Jiang are smuggled directly from the black market in Myanmar's land of jade in Myanmar's Kachin state where the billion-dollar industry is based.

2018 Documentary Award Finalist

The Price Of Jade, by Minzayar Oo

Myanmar’s secretive jade mines lie in the Kachin town of Hpakant which is located in the northern part of the country. Hpakant, also known as “the land of jade”, produces the world’s highest quality of the stone, which the Chinese have prized during millennia for its beauty and symbolism. As an old Chinese saying runs – “Gold is valuable but jade is priceless”.

Everyday in Hpakant, hundreds of thousands of young men who migrated from different regions of Myanmar with a dream to find a short-cut to wealth, swarm across mountains of mining waste dumped by the government licensed mining companies. A 1994 ceasefire between the Kachin Independence Army and Burmese military brought most of the jade land back under government control. Since then, large- scale extraction has began, with hundreds of backhoes, earthmovers and trucks working around the clock, leaving the traditional freelance prospectors to become illegal miners by the law. For them, it is also a perilous job especially when banks and slag heaps are de-stabilized by monsoon rain. A massive landslide in November 2015 at a government-licensed company waste-dumping site reportedly killed 114 people.

Drug use is almost intrinsic to jade mining as ‘shooting galleries’ operate openly in Hpakant with workers often exchanging lumps of jade for hits of heroine. Fierce access restrictions are currently in place to reduce public scrutiny of the industry’s biggest players, its rampant corruption and its horrific social cost. Armed conflict in the area also flared up again in mid-2012 leading to ambushes along the jade trading road, which is said to be lined with land mines, remnants of decades of civil war. The fighting has been reportedly present in and around Hpakant and the jade mines.

Lumps of the precious stone can represent a fortune for small-time prospectors, sometimes a handful piece of jade being worth for million dollars. But rare finds by them pale next to the staggering wealth extracted from this billions-dollars industry by Myanmar’s military, the tycoons it helped enrich, and firms linked to China where most of the jades end up illegally. A recent report by London-based NGO Global Witness put the size of Myanmar’s jade industry at $31 billion in 2014, equating to nearly half of national GDP and over 46 times the nation’s spending on healthcare. “Myanmar’s jade business may be the biggest natural resource heist in modern history,” says Global Witness analyst Juman Kubba.

Biography

My name is Minzayar Oo [b. 1988]. I am a Burmese photographer and visual storyteller based in my hometown Yangon. I am represented by Panos Pictures.

In 2012, I left my medical career and started working as a photojournalist with Reuters until 2016 when joined Panos Pictures. Today I have been working for various international publications such as The New York Times, GEO Germany, Stern, while also developing in-depth longer-term documentary projects on certain critical issues. My work have been published on TIME, The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, GEO, ParisMatch, La Repubblica, among others.

I have covered untold stories in Myanmar such as the rarely-accessed Kachin jade mines or the Rohingya crisis since 2012 when the communal violence broke out in Rakhine. In 2017 while on a GEO assignment in Bangladesh to document the Rohingya exodus, I was arrested by the Bangladeshi authorities on initial suspicion of espionage but released later and all charges dropped.

I have won awards at the Yangon Photo Festival, China International Press Photo, Foreign Correspondents Club Thailand, Days Japan International Photojournalism, Istanbul Photo Awards. My work The Price Of Jade was made a finalist in Magnum Photography Awards 2016 and also nominated for the Nannen Preis 2017. I was named the first photographer to receive the Martin Adler Prize at Rory Peck Awards in UK in 2017.

Website: https://www.panos.co.uk

Finalist Gallery with Captions

The Price Of Jade, by Minzayar Oo [Myanmar] is a Documentary Award Finalist in the Invisible Photographer Asia Awards 2018. View more 2018 Awards Finalists.

The Invisible Photographer Awards 2018 is proudly supported by G-Technology AP, Sony Singapore, GetIT Comms, Grenadier Press, Exactly Foundation, Photo Kathmandu, Spoon Creative and Objectifs – Centre for Photography and Film.