No stone left unturned in quest for fortune

A colorful career leads to the mountains of Mozambique

Ge Zhaoping is a man who learns his lessons well. These days when he heads out into the mountains looking for his fortune, he goes with a guard brandishing an AK-47.

A couple of years ago Ge was in a small, remote gem mine in Mozambique with a local guide and, through thick grass and from two or three meters away, heard what he thought were a few local miners chatting away.

The guide suddenly jabbed a finger into him and whispered anxiously, "Let's get out of here." After the pair fled from the site, the guide told him the group they had overheard had been sizing them up for robbery. After a few other similar close calls, Ge decided that having a bodyguard would be a good insurance policy. "With a gunman beside me I feel much safer," he says.

In the same measure that diamond can be said to be a girl's best friend, Ge's best friends are johnstonotite, sapphire and tanzanite. Those names may not exactly drip with the glamour of diamonds or trip off the tongue so easily, but they do fetch high prices.

But fortunately for Africa and for Ge, many of these gems are found in the continent, generally hidden sparsely in mountainous areas.

Ge is one of the intrepid types who crosses mountains and rivers looking to buy these gems from small-time miners.

Mozambique is home to various gems, especially high-quality johnstonotite. The gem vein stretches 1,000 kilometers north from the Indian Ocean port of Beira, the country's second-largest city, and searching for johnstontite is a preoccupation, if not an occupation, of thousands of locals.

"I visit these mines one by one, riding a motorcycle, seeking out the best stuff," Ge says. "If I am interested, we sit down and negotiate a price, and I pay cash."

A raw 15-carat piece of johnstonotite 80-percent clear will costs the equivalent of about $1,600 in Mozambique, but after processing, insetting and passing through a few hands the final price in a swish jewelry will be closer to $16,000, Ge says.

The price of premium gems continues to rise, he says, and that means his saddlebags are always swelling with cash as he makes his rounds. That and his foreign face make him a prime target for robbers.

It all adds to the picture of an industry that is both hazardous and haphazard. Unlike coal mines that are usually large operations, gemstone mining tends to be on a small scale and disorganized. A local can simply claim or buy an area of three to five sq m and start digging.

Ge is hewn from entirely different stone. He was born in Heilongjiang province in Northeast China, bordering Russia, and where winter lasts five months and temperatures often drop below minus 25 C.

For someone brought up in such unforgiving conditions and now leading life on the edge in a country more than 10,000 kilometers from home, you might expect Ge to have a fair degree of the rough and tumble about him, but outward signs of that are hard to find. There are no tattoos or neck chain, and he has wrinkles that seem deeper than they ought to be for a 51-year-old. He also he has a soft voice and wears a semi-permanent smile befitting a man born in the Year of the Rabbit.

However, what Ge does seem to possess is an acute sense of knowing when to move on.

In Heilongjiang after leaving school he worked as a technician for more than 10 years until his father was seriously ill, and he had to quit the job to take care of him.

In 1996 he got a chance to work as a technician for a big electronics company in South Korea on a two-year contract, but, Ge says, the company reneged on promises on salaries and airfares for Chinese workers, and they went on strike.

"My Korean was better than that of the other Chinese workers, so I kind of represented them in demanding our rights. The company regarded me as a ringleader and threatened to have me deported to China, so I fled the company."

He was jobless in a foreign country and in the years that followed he had to take countless temporary jobs to make a living, including washing dishes in restaurants and bricklaying.

During his eight-year stay in South Korea, Ge met some Chinese who were in the gemstone trade. They barely spoke Korean, so Ge stepped in to help from time to time and gradually picked up basic knowledge about gemstones.

Recalling his years in South Korea, Ge says his difficulties there helped him develop a strong mind and body that would prove invaluable later in rugged Mozambique.

In 2004 he returned to China, which by then was barely recognizable to him. He opened a factory making the Korean condiment kimchi, but it failed to take off. He finally opened a small shop selling gems in Beijing, but profits were slim, and after four years that business folded.

Ge and two friends analyzed their failure and concluded that they needed to buy gems directly from Africa, cutting out intermediaries and thus halving costs.

In 2008, Ge booked a flight to Mozambique and went there with two suitcases weighing 45kg. He had heavy, warm clothes for the mountainous treks between gem mines and safety gear for his motorcycle rides. In fact he prepared in such minute detail that he even took cotton swabs and toothpicks.

However, on his very first trips into the mountains his only food was preserved Chinese pickles and sauces to go with bread and water. Within several days the bread had gone moldy, Ge says, but he had no choice but to eat it.

After several months in the mountains eating the same food, he realized he could barely look at it anymore and started eating local food made of cassava, coconut and corn in equal parts. This, after months of moldy bread, was manna.

If his fastidious early preparations with food turned out to be poorly thought out, putting one particular item in his luggage when he went to Mozambique turned out to be inspired.

Three years ago as Ge was on a trip to mines deep in a mountain near Beira, he began to feel hot and cold intermittently and was soon lying on the ground writhing in agony.

"I could hear the locals talking. 'The Chinese man has malaria. He is dying.' There was nothing they could do for me. Lying there semi-conscious I recalled a Chinese doctor having once put artemisinin, an anti-malarial drug, into my bag. I then struggled to dig out two pills, and after resting for another day I reovered."

These days whenever Ge travels to Mozambique he still takes two suitcases with him, and he takes more medicine, including vitamins for when there are no vegetables when he is in the mountains. There are, of course, pills for malaria; and even heart disease pills, even though he has no heart problems as far as he is aware.

As for success in searching for gems, he reckons that comes down to luck.

"Even if you have more than 100 people digging all day, it is not going to guarantee even a single piece of any decent stone."

In his business, apart from being on the lookout for robbers and disease, you have to be wary of charlatans, he says.

Once he asked a digger whether he had anything worth selling, and before long the miner was dazzling Ge with a beautiful specimen that was "brilliant green from a distance". Examining it with a magnifying glass he found it was fake. Such attempts to dupe potential buyers are becoming more frequent, he says.

Ge says he dreams of building a business that includes supplying stone, cutting, design and insetting, so he can greatly bring down his overheads. But he realizes he faces enormous competition.

"In the journey I have embarked on I chance my luck and even risk my life every day. Now that I have managed to get some money together, I hope I can hire locals to look for stones and send them to Beijing I could then concentrate on the processing and commercial sides."

But he has not found the right partners, he says.

"So for now I just have to keep on looking for stones."

wangchao@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 06/20/2014 page28)