Word: jade
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Sinkiang Province (area: 705,769 sq. mi.; population: 4,360,000), sometimes called Chinese Turkestan, is a fairly rich, comparatively unexploited, thoroughly exotic area. Its principal exports have been wool, camel's-hair, sheep guts, gold, jade, fine horses, Chinese medicinal ingredients (elk horn, saiga antelope horn, bears' paws). The huge province has never been properly integrated with China, and since about 1930, Russian influence has almost amounted to domination. Since economically Sinkiang is already virtually a Russian province, Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek, no lover of Communists, may well have seen the sense of making concessions there...
Before Peiping fell to the Japanese in 1937, two hallowed objects were smuggled out of its ancient Forbidden City. About as easy to smuggle as a couple of dentists' chairs, they were an eight-foot, ten-inch white jade Buddhist pagoda (largest jade piece in the world), and a gold, lacquer and mother-of-pearl teakwood Dragon Throne on which Manchu emperors had sat from the 17th Century to the close of their reign. In great secrecy the pagoda and throne, (together valued at $3,000,000) were spirited out of China by coolie cart, mule train, river junk...
...Sinkiang (once part of China proper but now almost completely under Soviet dominance) to the Russian centres of Alma Ata and Sergiopol, on Russia's new Turk-Sib railroad. Over this Silk Road, then called the Imperial Highway, some 2,000 years ago camel caravans, loaded with silk, jade and lacquer, plodded their way to Samarkand, where the goods were shipped to Byzantium, Tyre, Rome. Seven centuries ago Marco Polo pushed his way down the Silk Road from the West to reach the court of Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan, and gazed upon a civilization which surpassed that...
Hero is strapping, serious-minded André Brelet, son of a bankrupt shipbuilder, who as a last resort takes a job as an Abbey guide. His wife Laura is the spoiled daughter of a bankrupt millowner, sullen, snobbish, shallow, a shrewish jade from her blonde head to her painted toes...
...caretaker at the Peabody Museum was the only one who saw the thief on the day of the crime. He later described him to police as 5 ft. 9 in. tall, and weighing about 150 pounds. The ornaments, including jade vessels and gold jewelry came to the museum five years ago and had been placed on display during the Tercentenary...