I first started seeing these about 2 years ago, usually heavily damaged and offered as large, Chinese-style decorator pieces — in fact, a few of these were chopped down from carvings that included floral designs and pedestals carved into the basalt matrix. As such, there are saw marks on the backs and sides of these pieces.

Good accicular clusters *on matrix* of this delicate material are notoriously difficult to obtain, even from India, because they are always crushed-- I suppose the exception would be the oversized, or densely packed examples-- but the more aesthetic specimens with this delicate appearance are somewhat  to find.    Most of the Viet examples get destroyed as well, but I had particular luck in finding examples where the clusters were relatively protected, such as this one.