Anniversaries 2024. Part 2

200 years ago – The first discovery of jade in the Eastern Sayan

The first discovery of jade in the Eastern Sayan. In 1824, the hunter Kharinskikh found stones in the form of round pebbles, which he delivered to the teacher of the Irkutsk gymnasium, writer and local historian Nikolai Semenovich Shchukin (1792-1883). One of the pebbles turned out to be agalmotolite, and the second was jade. Later, N.S. Shchukin discovered jade pebbles on the banks of the Onot and Biboy rivers. And he published information about the discovery of jade in 1826.

In 1835, the expedition of the mining master Kovrigin (? G.S. or N.N.) discovered jade in the valleys of the Kitoy and Onot rivers, which was reported in the 9th issue of the Mining Journal for 1836.

Later, Grigory Markianovich Permikin (1813-1879) and Jean-Pierre (Ivan Petrovich) Aliber attempted to find jade deposits in 1851, which ended with the discovery of rich jade-bearing placers and the beginning of their development. But the primary jade deposit was discovered only 100 years later, in 1925.

80 years ago

In 1944, 24 km. From the mouth upstream of the Kalar River (the Vitim River basin), a boulder of light green jade was found by Yuri Konstantinovich Dzevanovsky (1907-1971). This discovery was the forerunner of the discovery of the Vitim nephrite-bearing region.