Kansu St, Yau Ma Tei. Daily 9am-6pm. Yau Ma Tei’s Jade Market features several hundred stalls selling an enormous selection of jade jewellery, statues and antique reproductions. In part, jade owes its value to the fact that it’s a hard stone and very difficult to carve; it’s also said by the Chinese to promote longevity and prevent decay (royalty used to be buried in jade suits made of thousands of tiny tiles held together with gold wire). There are basically two kinds of jade: nephrite (which can be varying shades of green), and the rarer jadeite, much of which comes from Burma and which can be all sorts of colours. A rough guide to quality is that the jade should be cold to the touch and with a pure colour that remains constant all the way through; coloured tinges or blemishes can reduce the value. However, unless you know your stuff, the scope for being misled is considerable, so it’s more enjoyable to just poke around the stalls to see what turns up for a few dollars note that all the serious buying is over before lunch.