Burmese Gemstone Mining & Buddhist Exploitation

This paper explores mining in Burma/Myanmar. With particular attention to the ruby and jade industries, this paper investigates the relationship between Burmese Buddhist imperialism and the exploitation of the environment and borderland communities. Myanmar has produced the world’s most valuable rubies, and Chinese courts have favored Burmese jade for centuries. These extraordinarily lucrative gemstones have ornamented powerful Burmese and Chinese ritual objects and enriched royal patrons of Buddhism. At the same time, mining practices have inflicted extreme harms on minoritized communities and non-human beings. This paper examines the ways that Buddhist authorities have justified mining violence in royal orders, public inscriptions, and ritual artifacts from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. It argues that these sources reveal a pattern of situating violence as a small demerit that is justified by a larger agenda of establishing Burma as the earth’s last remaining realm that protects the “pure” Buddhism (sasana).