Bloodstone

Synonym: Oriental jasper

This is a craft stone that contains cinnabar and comprises cinnabar-containing rhyolitic crystal tuff composed of kaolinite, dickite, nacrite, and small amounts of alunite and cinnabar. It gets its name because dickite contains bright red cinnabar, which looks like chicken blood. The red portion is called ‘blood’, and the remainder is called ‘ground’, ‘small ground’ or ‘base’. When the mercury sulphide content is greater than 0.5%, microcrystalline cinnabar may precipitate and make up more than 20% of the stone. This stone has a dense blocky structure with a soil-like lustre, but the high-quality stone can have a greasy lustre and be slightly transparent or translucent. It has a density of 2.7–3.0 g/cm³. Bloodstone can be divided into frozen ground, soft ground, rigid ground, hard ground and suet ground types, and the suet ground stone that is completely red and has a high cinnabar content is the most valuable. It can be more valuable than Tian Huang stone....