Thanks, Jamey, I intend to remain vigilant and vocal.

By the way, I've never made it to Beijing, yet. A lot of other places, yes, but not Beijing city, yet....

You said "perhaps some entirely new process, or combination-process."

That may be the case. At the Tucson JOGS show I spoke with the folks selling Number 8 Nevada turquoise enhanced with a new process that darkened the matrix and fused (cemented? bonded?) the matrix with the turquoise. Number 8 turquoise is a lovely spiderwebbed turquoise that was easy to break along the matrix lines. Too brittle usually to be set in jewelry. The processed samples I saw were "rock hard" - not brittle at all.

They called it the "Eljen" process after the inventor or popularizer, Elven Jennings or Reno Nevada. Unlike the Foutz/Zachary enhancement (a quartz impregnation I think) the Eljen process goes through the entire stone, making turquoise and matrix uniformly hard.

Mr. Jennings would not give details but implied it was not a plastic. Another stone cutter said he could smell the plastic when he cut the stones treated by the Eljen process.

There is a confusing mention of the Eljen process at http://www.mindat.org/min-8013.html under the name Turquenite.