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Empress Dowager Cixi's Jade Obsession — And the Warlord Who Robbed Her Tomb
Empress Dowager Cixi's Jade Obsession — And the Warlord Who Robbed Her Tomb
A jade-loving ruler, a coffin filled with treasure, and a 1928 robbery that left one of China's most famous missing-jade mysteries behind.
In 1928, a Chinese warlord told his soldiers they were going on routine military exercises. Then he handed out dynamite.
What they were actually doing was breaking into the tomb of Empress Dowager Cixi, the woman who had ruled China for nearly five decades, twenty years after her death. What they found inside kicked off a mystery that's still not fully solved today, and it starts with one woman's genuinely obsessive love of a single stone: Burmese Jadeite.
An Empress Obsessed With Jadeite
Cixi effectively ruled China from 1861 until her death in 1908, and alongside everything else history remembers her for, her contemporaries also knew her as being specifically, almost compulsively obsessed with fei cui, the vivid green Burmese Jadeite that had circulated in Yunnan since at least the fifteenth century and reached the Qing court in the early eighteenth century, before Cixi helped drive its nationwide popularity.
This wasn't vague enthusiasm. Palace workshop records from her reign are startlingly precise: one 1877 order for just 17 Jadeite ornaments cost nearly 40,000 taels of silver, an amount that left regional customs officials complaining in writing that they couldn't source enough material to keep up. Provincial governors, ministers, and foreign envoys all learned that Jadeite was the one gift guaranteed to delight her. One governor's gift of a single pair of Jadeite earrings and matching bracelets reportedly left her momentarily speechless, turning them over in the light for a long time before she could say anything.
It's largely thanks to Cixi that pure, vivid green Jadeite, what's still called “imperial green” today, became the standard the whole country judged jade by, replacing the paler, whiter stone that had dominated Chinese taste for the century before her. Learn what defines this exceptional color in our guide to Imperial Jade.
Buried in a Fortune
When Cixi died in 1908, she was buried the way she'd lived: covered in it. Historical accounts, later partly corroborated by objects that still exist today, describe a coffin packed with carved Jadeite: Buddhas, peaches, a jade lotus root, cabbages carved with individual insects perched on the leaves, and a watermelon carved from a single piece of stone, reportedly kept as her pillow. One period estimate valued the watermelon alone at over 2 million taels of silver. Estimates for everything placed in the coffin ran past 5 million taels, and at least one contemporary account claimed it was worth enough to make a real dent in the nation's foreign debt, if it had ever been recovered.
The 1928 Tomb Robbery
Twenty years of peace ended in the summer of 1928, when a warlord named Sun Dianying moved his troops into position around the Eastern Qing Tombs under the cover story of military exercises. Once the area was sealed off, his men dynamited their way into the underground burial chambers of both Cixi and the Qianlong Emperor. It took days.
A soldier who took part later gave an account of it, and it's genuinely unsettling. When his unit pried open Cixi's coffin, he said the jewels packed inside caught the light and threw off a rosy glow bright enough to overwhelm their flashlights. Cixi's body, twenty years on, was reportedly still eerily intact, enough that some of the soldiers panicked and wanted to lay their rifles across the coffin, worried she might sit up. Nothing did happen, of course, but they stripped the coffin anyway: a huge pearl from her mouth, the jade pillow, everything sewn into her burial robes. Whatever couldn't be carried by hand was hauled out by cart.
The Unsolved Mystery
Sun Dianying was never seriously punished. By most accounts, he spent the next several years handing out pieces of exactly this loot as bribes to stay out of prison, and it apparently worked. One claim, relayed decades later by a former Nationalist intelligence official, has Sun personally admitting that he passed Cixi's jade pillow along to T. V. Soong, who was serving as the Republic of China's finance minister at the time.
Whether that's exactly what happened is genuinely disputed, and it's part of a larger scholarly debate: some historians have argued the “watermelon” wasn't Jadeite at all, but a much cheaper American gemstone called watermelon tourmaline. The most careful research on the question, working through Qing court purchase records, memoirs, and the accounts of jewelry-trade veterans who handled comparable pieces, makes a strong case that it really was Jadeite, and that the tourmaline theory doesn't hold up chronologically. The term “watermelon tourmaline” wasn't even coined until 1910, two years after Cixi died. Either way, the piece itself has never resurfaced. It's one of the more famous unrecovered treasures in modern Chinese history.
What Survives Today
Here's the strange, half-satisfying part: while the watermelon itself is gone, close relatives of it aren't. Jadeite carvings from the same era, in the same style, genuinely do survive and remain on public display, including a famous jade cabbage carved with fighting katydids in Taiwan's National Palace Museum, and a similar piece in the Tianjin Museum. Even though the most legendary object from Cixi's collection vanished into a warlord's pocket over a century ago, you can still walk up to its cousin behind museum glass.
The Same Stone, Nearly 250 Years Later
The material at the center of all of this, the stone an empress went to these lengths for and a warlord risked everything to steal, is the same material that has been mined in Upper Myanmar and traded into China for centuries, with the northern Myanmar source becoming widely known to Chinese traders in the late eighteenth century. The mines of Upper Myanmar remain the world's primary source of fine Jadeite today. It's the same stone, chemically and geologically unchanged, whether it's carved into a museum-piece cabbage or an everyday bangle.
What's changed is access. For most of Jadeite's history in China, the finest material was something only an empress could realistically get her hands on. Every piece Mandalay Jade sells is natural, untreated Type A Jadeite sourced from Myanmar. Not imperial-grade, tomb-robbery-worthy material, to be clear, but the same mineral, from the same part of the world, carrying forward a tradition that's been running for nearly 250 years and counting. Read more about why Burmese Jadeite became so important, or explore the broader 7,000-year history of jade.
Explore Natural Type A Burmese Jadeite
The same stone, the same source, several fewer warlords involved.
Historical reference: research by Dr. Sun Laichen, published by Lotus Gemology, together with Qing palace workshop records and accounts connected with the 1928 tomb robbery. Some details surrounding Cixi's burial treasure and its later movement remain disputed. Read the source research.
