In the spring of 2003, a donkey cart silently headed towards the depths of the Gobi Desert.
As one of the most mysterious no-man's land in China, the legend of Lop Nur has always been the "sea of death" that adventure fans keep away from them.
Around 330 AD, Lop Nur looked completely opposite to today. As the only way to Silk Road , Lop Nur was the intersection of water sources such as Peacock River and Tarim River, and also formed the second largest saltwater lake in the inland China.
However, due to the changes in climate and the destruction of human life, Lop Nur and now have completely become a desert and no longer have the vitality of the past.
Many civilizations and ancient countries gradually disappeared under the yellow sand with the lack of water sources. This is why Lop Nur is so dangerous, but it still makes many people flock to it.
So, who is the person on this donkey cart? Is their purpose also the countless treasures buried deep in the ground?
The cause of the incident also starts with the leading man, Zhao Duliang.
1. The hot jade market
There is a common saying that everyone must be very familiar with - gold in troubled times, antiques in prosperous times.
means that in the war-torn era, you must invest in gold if you have money.
Because no matter how the price changes, the value of gold will never fluctuate too much. If you buy a house and real estate with money, if a war starts and a shell comes, your savings for half of your life will be gone.
So, buy gold in troubled times.
Then when people's lives are gradually stable and they don't have to worry about food and clothing, many people have to pursue some spiritual energy outside of material life.
So, antiques have become the best investment target.
. Among antique collections, jade has always been enthusiastically sought after by the market as a major category.
In our concept, jade can not only make it more and more warm by wearing it, but also can stop the disaster for the owner.
Therefore, in the early 2000s, both men and women, when they had some spare money at home, they liked to buy a piece of jade to wear, which led to a wave in the domestic jade industry.
And in this jade craze, Zhao Duliang from Shaanxi also discovered the business opportunities.
Zhao Duliang is from Baoji City, Shaanxi Province. As the birthplace of the ancient Silk Road, Shaanxi is also one of the important rise of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation. Since , 14 dynasties have established capitals in Shaanxi one after another.
And a city with such a rich historical heritage, there are naturally countless treasures buried underground.
Zhao Duliang's parents were engaged in the antique industry. After that, with the popularity of the jade industry, they began to specialize in jewelry and jade.
Over the past few years, the Zhao family's jewelry has been quite famous locally, and Zhao Duliang has gradually accumulated a lot of experience in jade after his parents' management of family business over the years.
Seeing that his son was so interested in jade, the old couple simply handed over all the family business to Zhao Duliang, and went to enjoy his old age.
Fortunately, Zhao Duliang seems to have a special talent for jade. In his hands, his own jade is also booming, and he has accumulated a lot of wealth for it.
There are no good things for people, and no flowers are red for a hundred days.
Just as Zhao Duliang was preparing to further expand the scale, the jade market began to gradually cool down.
Looking back at the time, many things were popular overnight, such as Tibetan Mastiff, Bodhizi , amber, etc., all of which have had an extremely prosperous history.
But as time goes by, when the popularity slowly falls and the market gradually becomes saturated, their prices begin to slowly slide.
Seeing that his income has been getting worse and worse in recent years, Zhao Duliang also saw it and was anxious in his heart. What exactly can I use to obtain a larger profit of ? Zhao Duliang thinks about this issue every day.
After thinking about it for a while, he finally made an important decision.
Since the market demand has gradually declined, I can only find a way to obtain better raw stones at the lowest price.
In this way, Zhao Duliang turned his attention to the distant Xinjiang.
2. The formation of jade to Xinjiang
generally has very strict conditions. Most of the time is under the influence of geological movements, and the jade we see today is formed by the invasion of magma .
Therefore, there are several major jade production areas in our country.
In fact, Shaanxi was originally one of them, and the main output was Lantian jade , but in order to obtain a larger profit margin, Zhao Duliang still set his target in Xinjiang.
Compared with Shaanxi, Xinjiang has far more minerals to be developed than Shaanxi.
So, he did not stop and Zhao Duliang made up his mind and embarked on a treasure hunt for Lop Nur with his savings over the years, which led to the beginning of the scene.
Although Zhao Duliang had already understood the local situation before coming, when he really came to Lop Nur and looked at the endless desert in front of him, he was still a little confused. Several workers from
and his team lived in the home of a local farmer together with Zhao Duliang.
Everyone is full of confidence and believe that they will definitely find the best jade minerals on this land.
After a night of correction, the next morning, several people went to the local jade market enthusiastically for investigation. After some visits, the result was not satisfactory.
It turns out that in the local jade market, although the types of jade are richer than those in Shaanxi, the quality is uneven.
Some of the products with slightly better quality and are also very expensive.
More importantly, these good-quality jade ores are firmly controlled by several big bosses, and it is impossible for me, an outsider to intervene.
Nowadays, if you want to find better quality raw stones, you can only go deeper into Lop Nur to find those primitive mineral veins that have not been developed.
But there is no way out. Just when a few people didn't know where to go, the villagers living in the residential house pointed out a clear way for them.
According to fellow villagers, when jade first emerged a few years ago, many people would go to the mines beside them to pick up stones every day.
Over the past few years, there have been fewer and fewer jades here. Later, some people put their minds deep in the Gobi Desert, so many brave people formed a team to explore the depths of Lop Nur.
, but I didn’t expect that there would be rewarding things to go there this time. It is said that several people actually dug up the yellow gem near Mount Altai. After the news of
came out, many people went there to find out, but they never heard of anyone digging out yellow gems.
As for the authenticity of this message, there is no way to know.
The speaker has no intention, the listener has his intention. It was originally a chat from a fellow villager, but Zhao Duliang seized the opportunity.
There is no clue about ores at the moment, so why not go to Altai Mountain to take a look, and you may gain something.
So, Zhao Duliang proposed to lead the way with his fellow villagers, and the few of them set out tomorrow to go to Altai Mountain together, and his benefits would be indispensable afterwards.
Facing the temptation of money, this fellow villager hesitated because Mount Altai is not only located in the depths of the Gobi Desert, but also has many legends of monsters.
For example, we are familiar with savages, snowman , etc. The legendary monsters often go down the mountain in the snowy winter to eat their livestock at farmers' homes.
And these illusory legends are not only circulated in our country, but even Western countries are afraid and obsessed with Mount Altai.
In 1776, a Swedish physician named Francis was obsessed with human research, so he bought the corpses of ape from poachers many times, hoping to find out the secret of the origin of humans from it.
On December 14, 1780, Dr. Francis found a strange skull in the poacher's hands.
This skull has a similar shape to that of a human, but strangely it has sharp fangs in its mouth, which is different from any known creature.
Faced with this exciting discovery, Francis immediately decided to go to the area where the skull was discovered, which is the west of Mount Altai.
Later, it was rumored that Francis found a mysterious city called Tenis underground in the Altai Mountains.
In this underground city, all monsters with fangs live in it.
and they can cause the other party to be infected with the same inexplicable virus by biting the prey.
After living here for a few years, Francis finally decided to return to Sweden and bring his great discoveries to the world.
Before leaving, in order to better understand this race, Francis took the initiative to ask them to infect themselves as a similar person.
and this has become one of the sources of vampire in Western world .
But all this is just a rumor. Compared with the vampire in the story, the yellow gem mine is also hard to find.
So under Zhao Duliang's temptation, the fellow villager finally agreed to lead the way for several people.
3. Discovering gem mine
In the rarely visited Gobi Desert, Zhao Duliang and his party have to fight against the harsh weather environment every day. As a huge mountain range across China, Kazakhstan , Russia and Mongolia, the environment here is very complex, and rampant poachers are also one of the dangers here.
When Zhao Duliang and others finally arrived at Mount Altai, the magnificence in front of them deeply shocked everyone.
Under the blue sky and white clouds, the towering Altai Mountains traverse thousands of miles, looking amazing.
After studying the local stone quality, Zhao Duliang had a premonition that there must be a real gem mine here.
But when they continued to go deeper, the scene in front of them made several people stunned.
It turns out that Zhao Duliang is not the only one who is interested in Altai Mountain. Long before he came, a boss from Guangdong had already contracted the mine.
When they saw the duck flying, the group was very depressed, but Zhao Duliang said he would not leave.
He came from Shaanxi from all over the world and bet on this mine. He would like to see the Guangdong boss anyway.
When the other party learned that someone was going to see him, the boss was also surprised and flew from Guangdong to Xinjiang overnight.
After several people contacted each other, Zhao Duliang learned about the current situation in the mine from the other party.
It turns out that this Guangdong boss was not in the jade industry before, but had some savings in business, so he followed the trend of investing in the years when jade was so popular and contracted this mine.
After several years, there was no yellow gem in this mine, which made the boss lose confidence in this mine.
So he returned to Guangdong to manage his business. The mine only left a few miners to be responsible for daily maintenance, and it was basically in a semi-stagnant state.
As soon as he heard this, Zhao Duliang immediately became energetic. Judging from his view of being engaged in the jade industry for many years, this must be a real treasure mine, but it was the Guangdong boss who dug the wrong position, which led to no gains.
So, Zhao Duliang took the opportunity to contract the mine, and the Guangdong boss happily accepted it when he saw someone coming to take over the mess.
So the two immediately signed the contract, and the gem mine was transferred to Zhao Duliang's hands.
After getting Xinxinnian’s treasure, Zhao Duliang immediately invited professional exploration personnel to re-survey the mine.
Under the guidance of experts, the group changed the direction of excavation.Not long after, they found some small pieces of tourmaline and aquamarine from the mine. These gems are not of high value, but they indicate that there must be a larger treasure below.
The facts were as expected by several people. A few months later, the workers in the mine suddenly hurriedly found Zhao Duliang, claiming that they dug up gems below.
As soon as he heard this news, Zhao Duliang sat up and hurried to the mine cave.
In the dark and deep mine cave, there was indeed a small pile of raw stones emitting a faint light.
Some workers are watching around, and those who know the knowledge can see that this is the legendary Night Pearl .
Night Pearl has been recorded since ancient times and has always been used as a rare ore for royal use.
Going farther away, once, Cixi Cixi had a night pearl of about 787.28 carats in her mouth. At that time, it had sold 10.8 million taels of silver in 1908, and today it would be 810 million yuan.
In modern times, a night pearl appeared in Huize County in Yunnan. However, after experts studied this night pearl, it was found that this meteorite from the sky, with a value of 200 million yuan.
Everyone was talking and talking, and Zhao Duliang on the side was even more anxious.
He immediately ordered that all the workers put down their work and dig deeper around this area.
After everyone's careful digging, an unprecedented huge ore was carried out of the mine by a crane.
This night pearl raw stone has a diameter of 2 meters and weighs 8 tons. Thinking that a bead can sell for hundreds of millions. Such a huge piece of raw stone must be a sky-high price.
So, the ecstatic Zhao Duliang immediately returned to Shaanxi with the raw stone and hired more than a dozen workers to polish it carefully.
After a year of hard work, the rough stone was polished into a huge night pearl weighing six tons and having a diameter of 1.6 meters.
Looking at the beads in front of him, Zhao Duliang had already seen the day he got rich.
So he brought this huge night pearl to the 2007 Xi'an Expo.
4. "Sky-high" Night Pearl
In the venue, everyone's eyes were attracted by the huge night pearl in front of them, and everyone was talking about it. This was an amazing treasure.
And Zhao Duliang, the owner of Night Pearl, was even more happy to hear that after the expo, he applied for the Guinness World Record specifically for this bead, and an expert estimate was that the value of this bead was above 2.2 billion.
When Zhao Duliang heard about this price, he was so happy that he couldn't stop talking.
Then, Zhao Duliang was also invited by expos from various places with this night pearl, and many TV stations also came to him for interviews.
For a moment, this huge night pearl became a myth in the local jade world.
But after a few years, everyone's freshness passed, and gradually no one mentioned this bead again, and the sky-high price of 2.2 billion is even more expensive.
In fact, although Night Pearl sounds magical, it is essentially just a type of fluorite .
The so-called fluorite is volcanic magma . During the cooling process, the fluorine inside it gradually rises, combining with calcium ion to form calcium fluoride .
This fluorite will produce a faint luster under external stimulation, such as sunlight or temperature changes.
And the reason why the ancient night pearl was expensive is that the ancients did not know its true luminous principle, so they overdoed the myth, and their own price was not high.
In modern times, many of the luminous toys of some children were also carved from this kind of fluorite. Although Mr. Zhao's fluorite is indeed huge, it is also the largest night pearl in the world.
But its own price is far less than 2.2 billion, so naturally no one will buy it.
Zhao Duliang has been running around to participate in the exhibition in recent years, and he has already spent a lot of money on transportation. Seeing that the night pearl cannot be sold, Zhao Duliang was completely disappointed.
But the stones I finally dug out can never be placed at home and fall into ashes.
So Zhao Duliang gritted his teeth and simply placed it in Yuhuangding Park in Yantai, Shandong for tourists to visit. If someone likes it, he will sell it himself.
But more than ten years have passed in a flash. Now this night pearl still acts as a "street light" in the park. Many people come here to touch this magical bead, but has not had any people who want to buy it.
I don’t know whether it was Mr. Zhao’s luck or his misfortune to discover this night pearl.
