Robbers and charlatans are just two of the dangers this gem buyer faces, Wang Chao reports.

Ge Zhaoping is a man who learns his lessons well. These days when he heads out into the Mozambique mountains looking to make 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.

While diamonds might be a girl's best friend, Ge's best friends are johnstonotites, sapphires and tanzanites. Fortunately for Africa, and for Ge, these gems are to be found on the continent hidden sparsely in mountainous areas.

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 johnstonotite is a preoccupation, if not an occupation, of thousands of locals. The intrepid Ge crosses mountains and rivers looking to buy the gems from small-time miners.

"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 them cash."

A raw 15-carat piece of johnstonotite 80-percent clear 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 piece will be 10 times as much, Ge says.

The price of premium gems continues to rise, 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.

Ge was born in Heilongjiang province in Northeast China, 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 the 51-year-old to have a fair degree of the rough and tumble about him, but the outward signs of that are hard to find, and he has a soft voice and wears a semi-permanent smile. However, he also possesses 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 became 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 a strike at the factory left him jobless in a foreign country, and over the next eight years he took countless temporary jobs to make a living, including washing dishes in restaurants and bricklaying.

But while he was there, 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.

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

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

In 2008, Ge booked a flight to Mozambique and went there with two suitcases weighing 45 kilograms. He had heavy, warm clothes for the mountainous treks between gem mines and safety gear for his motorcycle rides. Despite contracting malaria, Ge had found himself a new profession.

Apart from robbers and disease, the other problem is 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". However, examining it with a magnifying glass Ge found it was fake. Such attempts to dupe potential buyers are becoming more frequent, he says.

Now that he has managed to get some money together, he is looking to hire locals to look for stones and send them to Beijing, so he can concentrate on the processing and commercial sides. But he says he hasn't found the right partners yet.

So for now he continues to look for stones, "chancing my luck and risking my life every day".

Contact the writer at wangchao@chinadaily.com.cn

Ge Zhaoping has had a few hair-raising experiences looking to buy gems in the mountains of Mozambique and now takes a gun-toting guard along with him. Provided to China Daily

Mozambique is home to various gems, especially high-quality johnstonotite.

(China Daily 06/29/2014 page4)