A mother and son who were caught trying to carry almost 18 kilograms of pounamu, the greenstone that Ngāi Tahu regard as a national treasure, through Auckland Airport have appeared for sentencing in the Manukau District Court, closing the first case of its kind New Zealand Customs has ever taken to a conviction.
Xin Li and her son Boyuan Zhang were stopped at Auckland International Airport in July 2024 with 17.9 kilograms of raw pounamu packed in their luggage as they prepared to fly to China. That is more than three times the five kilogram limit a single traveller is allowed to take out of the country without official consent. The pair were found guilty after a defended hearing earlier this year, and the sentencing brings to an end a case that Ngāi Tahu and Customs have both described as a warning to anyone tempted to move the stone offshore.
The law the pair fell foul of is the Customs Export Prohibition (Pounamu) Order 2021, which makes it illegal to take more than five kilograms of raw pounamu out of New Zealand without the consent of the Minister of Customs. The Minister can only grant that consent after taking written advice from Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu or, depending on where the stone was lifted, the Mawhera Incorporation. Finished pieces such as carved jewellery and small souvenirs are not caught by the rule, so a visitor leaving with a hei tiki around their neck has nothing to worry about. It is the raw, unworked stone, prised from rivers and ranges, that the order is built to keep at home.
According to RNZ, Judge Richard McIlraith accepted at the trial that the pair may not have fully grasped the law, but told the court that ignorance of the law is no defence to this charge. The point matters, because Customs says the great majority of the people it catches at the border are genuinely unaware that there are any limits at all on carrying greenstone out of the country.
Pounamu sits at the heart of why this prosecution carries so much weight. Under the Ngāi Tahu (Pounamu Vesting) Act 1997, all naturally occurring pounamu within the iwi’s South Island takiwā is owned by Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. In other words, stone taken from a riverbed in Te Wai Pounamu does not belong to whoever picks it up. It already has an owner, and removing large quantities of it to sell overseas is, in the eyes of the iwi, the theft of a taonga that was handed back to them as part of their Treaty settlement.
The scale of the trade Customs is trying to hold back is becoming clearer. Figures released by the agency and reported by 1News show 293.9 kilograms of pounamu seized in 17 separate incidents between 2016 and 2025. The worst single year was 2024, when 81.2 kilograms were stopped in two busts at Auckland Airport. Last year brought the most individual cases, with six interceptions totalling 43.87 kilograms. One of the largest single hauls came back in 2016, when almost 50 kilograms were found in a passenger’s suitcase.
Customs has stressed that it weighs each case on its merits rather than treating every traveller as a smuggler. Comptroller Christine Stevenson said, when the agency returned earlier seizures to the West Coast, that it is illegal to export pounamu weighing more than five kilograms unless consented to by the Minister of Customs. The prohibition is not new either. A version of it has been in place for more than 70 years, long before the 2021 order tidied up the rules.
That return of stone is part of the story too. In November 2024, Customs handed roughly 60 kilograms of recovered pounamu back to Poutini Ngāi Tahu, the West Coast hapū, in a ceremony at Arahura Marae near Hokitika, as reported by New Zealand Customs. That stone came from two earlier failed export attempts, a 50 kilogram seizure in 2016 and a 10 kilogram parcel intercepted at the International Mail Centre in 2022. For the people of the West Coast, getting the stone home matters as much as any penalty handed down in a courtroom.
Ngāi Tahu leaders welcomed the original guilty verdict as a turning point. As the Otago Daily Times reported, the iwi said the result sent a clear message that anyone who tries to take pounamu out of the country without permission can be prosecuted and convicted. After years of watching stone disappear through the airport with little to show for it, the runanga treated the first successful case as proof that the law finally had teeth.
The wider worry, which Ngāi Tahu has raised repeatedly, is the online black market that has grown up around the stone, where raw pounamu changes hands for sums that make the risk of a border check look worthwhile to some. The Auckland Airport case shows how that demand reaches all the way to the departure gate, and how a souvenir packed in a suitcase can turn into a criminal charge.
What do you make of the way New Zealand protects pounamu, and should the penalties for trying to smuggle it out be tougher still? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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