Bairendaba! (Yindu)

I am posting another update from China, this one dedicated to the minerals of the Bairendaba Deposit, generally referred to as the “Yindu Mine,” as the workings are controlled by the Yindu Mining Company.  The Mineralogical Record recently published an article on this site, and while it provides excellent background information, I do feel that the images just scratched the surface of what this area has produced— most of the pictured specimens seem to have come from a 1-2 year period before they started hitting the really wacky stuff. 

 I first noticed specimens from Yindu around 2013—a dealer in Tucson who had been focusing on the nearby Huanggang mine happened to have one flat of blue/purple crystals on siderite matrixes, though unfortunately the surfaces were somewhat frosted, and the quality was not very high. Then around 2018 I started to see the now-familiar blues with the purple phantoms, followed by what someone decided to market as the “ghost eye” material (dark purple, with white zones near the centers, reminiscent of the “alien eye” material from Erongo), and the pyrhottite— this is what was mainly shown int he Mineralogical Record article. It was during the pandemic however, that the really weird (and I think most beautiful) material started to come out— bright colors, and combinations that I had never seen before.

With that said, I think this has become my favorite fluorite locality. It may sound like sacrilege to some, but the only other location that I can compare it to in terms of variation and color would be the southern Illinois Fluourspar District.  While the specimens from the Yindu area rarely reach the same sizes (the average size for “good” crystals is usually under 2 cm) the variation of colors, habits, and the crazy internal features caused by successive generations of growth makes them more varied (and in my opinion much more interesting) than the vast majority of examples from other places.  While they definitely have a certain “look” to them that makes them attributable to this deposit, I find that this locality seems to suffer less from the general uniformity that localities tend to produce— for example 98% of Yaogangxian will be blue or purple, material from the Spanish localities will almost always be Blue or Yellow, and so on. Unfortunately, the way they blast here seems to cause lots of damage— so finding perfectly clean ones is hard, particularly in the larger sizes. As such, miniatures and thumbnails are more easy to find.  The other issue that many seem to have is that they will require backlighting— much like Okorusu or Erongo, (and I guess analogous to the Malagasy liddicoatite) the successive generations of growth tend to produce layering that makes it difficult for light (and therefor the individual colors) to come through— the second half of the update has this type. Where backlighting is not necessary, the prices will be higher— and that has definitely been the case here in China a well. 

I’ve tried to get as many different styles as I could, though I’m sure there are plenty that I have missed. Having been stuck in the USA when the stuff started coming out, I’ve felt like I’ve been playing “catch up” trying to find examples of various habits. 

For those of you still reading, I’d also like to include a note about pocket names: note that there are none, despite many producing specimens of quite distinct appearance. It used to be the case that only exceptional discoveries were worthy of earning pocket names, though it seems that current marketing trends have made this common practice, in order to increase the marketability of specimens from locations that produce successive pockets of similar material. This has especially been the case with fluorite. I would like to point out that almost every crystal technically comes out of a pocket— while it can be argued that these names add to provenance and assist in dating finds, i would encourage collectors to differentiate when there is a significance to the pocket, and when it is just a marketing ploy. 

As with the last two updates, shipping to the USA is a flat $16, and is combinable with items from the last two updates. Other countries please inquire.