Precious, p.14
Precious, page 14
Of all the spinel’s fans in high places, none were more enthusiastic than the Mughal emperors who ruled large swaths of the Asian subcontinent at the height of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal Empire was a cultural and artistic as well as political powerhouse: its patronage of artists, architects, and craftsmen was legendary, and the modern image of India largely remains its creation: from the Taj Mahal to Delhi’s Red Fort and the Buland Darwaza (Victory Gate) at the dynastic capital of Fatehpur Sikri. The Mughal penchant for lavish art, vast architecture, and showpiece jewelry was not simply the expression of wealth and power. It also represented the projection of identity. As Mongol-Turkish outsiders to what they called Hindustan, the Mughals strove to establish legitimacy by emphasizing their connection to a previous ruling dynasty: the Timurids, whose empire spanning Turkey and Central Asia had extended into modern Pakistan and northern India. Timur, also known as Tamerlane (1336–1405), a descendant of Genghis Khan, had captured and sacked Delhi in 1398. His great-great-great-grandson, Babur, who had inherited a tiny piece of the fragmented Timurid Empire, would repeat this feat in 1526 and become the first Mughal emperor, reigning until his death in 1530. Babur, a warlord who wrote poetry almost as freely as he drank wine, and who seems to have enjoyed designing palaces as much as planning invasions, created the template for a ruling dynasty of aesthetes.[8]
Babur’s successors amplified his taste for the extravagant as much as they expanded his physical empire. As the decades passed, Mughal emperors became renowned as the world’s most lavish jewelry collectors, with extravagantly sized spinels at the forefront. The fourth emperor, Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), was described by the English priest Reverend Edward Terry as the “greatest and richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth,” and by the Flemish diamond merchant Jacques de Coutre as “looking like an idol on account of the quantities of jewels he wore, with many precious stones around his neck as well as spinels, emeralds and pearls on his arms, and diamonds hanging from his turban.”[9] While many gemstones were embraced at the Mughal court, spinel held a special status. A catalogue describing the court of Jahangir’s father, the long-reigning Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605), described how one of his treasury’s twelve sections was reserved for gemstones, and that these were split into three groups: the first for spinel, the second for ruby, sapphire, diamond, and emerald, and the third for pearl.[10] According to the Mughal expert Susan Stronge, “all precious stones were eagerly sought, but spinels had a superior position and were kept separately.”[11]
In addition to its size and striking color, the basis of spinel’s preeminence can be explained by the importance of Persian tradition in Mughal society. Persian polymaths did not just sprinkle spinel into their poetry as a piece of imagery. They also approached it scientifically, the scholar al-Biruni describing la’al as “a red gem, translucid, limpid, which resembles a superlative ruby in color. It often surpasses it for its beauty and glamour but it differs from it in hardness.” These characteristics made spinels a regular adornment to the turbans and crowns of Persian rulers, where they often sat alongside rubies (the distinction underlining how early Eastern connoisseurs of la’al had no trouble telling the two red gems apart). As the art historian Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani has explained: “spinels…appear to have shone with a unique brilliance in Iranian culture and later in Hindustan where Persian prevailed as the language of literature and social intercourse.” He has shown how the spinel features as a consistent metaphor in Persian poetry dating to the tenth century, with wine often being described as “molten spinels,” and “[the] ascent of the sun in the sky…likened to a spinel coming out of its mine.”[12]
The associations with sun, fire, blood, and wine are familiar ones for red stones, and in different contexts have also been attached to both ruby and garnet. Yet in Mughal India, where Persian was the court language and “courtly culture…drew on the rich and highly developed literary and scientific traditions of Iran,” spinel was esteemed as first among equals.[13] Practical considerations also helped to elevate it. Its sheer size made it appropriate for the tradition of gemstone carving that was popular in Iranian and Mughal royal circles. The beads would be drilled with diamond-tipped points so they could be strung into necklaces and headdresses or strapped onto armbands, and they had the names of their past and present owners carved into them, along with notable dates and sometimes longer inscriptions.
Several spectacular examples have survived, in some cases assembled by later jewelers. One such necklace, featuring eleven spinel cabochons, sold at auction in 2011 for close to $5 million. Three of the stones are engraved, two with Jahangir’s name, and a third also with his two successors: Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). All three names also feature on a 133-carat spinel bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1922 by Lady Carew.[*4] With succession a continually contested issue for the Mughals, stones like these would have been valuable symbols used by emperors to assert their authority and legitimacy.[*5] Their engraving was a way of validating the hereditary record on something considered immutable and eternal: hard, huge, and historic precious gems.
Shah Jahan’s life would end in ignominy, usurped and imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, but at the height of his power he had been the archetypal Mughal ruler, responsible for some of the empire’s most lasting icons. He consciously presented himself as a Timurid—choosing to wear a full beard as the dynasty’s most famous ancestor had done, unlike his father or grandfather, and adopting a title that had also been attached to Timur, styling himself as the second “Lord of the Conjunction.”[*6] [14] He was also a builder on a scale grand even by Mughal standards: the architect of both the Taj Mahal, tomb for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, and the Peacock Throne, a beyond blinged-up stately seat that cost twice as much as the Taj and took seven years to complete.
Sitting on top of the Peacock Throne were two gemstones that would become enduring symbols of power and conquest in the centuries that followed, as Iranian, Sikh, and finally British forces took possession of the supreme Mughal treasures. One was the Koh-i-Noor Diamond. The second, an engraved spinel, was the stone that became known as the Timur Ruby. Like the Black Prince’s Ruby, this spinel is now in the British Royal Collection. And like that stone it carries a double misnomer, for this cabochon is neither a ruby nor was it ever owned by Timur. It is another example of spinel’s deliciously twisted history, and the layers of confusion that have built up around these enormous stones. As is so often the case with spinel, a large gemstone has given rise to a series of even taller stories.
Weighing 352.5 carats and shaped like a slightly squashed human heart, the Timur Ruby is engraved with the names of five Mughal emperors, along with that of Nader Shah, the Persian prince who had taken the gem—along with the Peacock Throne in its entirety—when he sacked Delhi in 1739. The British seized it from its Sikh owners after their annexation of Punjab in 1849, along with treasures including the Koh-i-Noor. In her journal, Queen Victoria recorded her admiration for the gem: “The rubies [sic] are even more wonderful [than the pearls and emeralds]. They are cabochons, unset but pierced. The one is the largest in the world, therefore even more remarkable than the Koh-i-noor!”[*7] [15] This special “ruby” was then mounted into a diamond necklace with three smaller spinels by Garrard in 1853.
Confusion crept in more than half a century later, when Sir James Dunlop Smith, then private secretary to the viceroy of India, was deputed to source the provenance of several Crown Jewels of Indian origin, in response to a request from Queen Mary, the wife of George V. Susan Stronge, who has studied the Timur Ruby in detail and done more than anyone to sort truth from abundant myth, has shown that Dunlop Smith’s work set off a train of misunderstandings, mistranslations, and misapprehensions that forged one of the great gemstone myths.
Dunlop Smith was given special access to the Timur Ruby, which was removed from its mount so he and a translator could examine the inscriptions. Yet despite this close examination, he appears to have confused it with another spinel he had read about that had belonged to Timur and that was also engraved with the “Lord of the Conjunction” title. Rushing to make the association, he appears to have glossed over inconsistencies in the inscriptions, as well as the fact that this title was adopted by multiple emperors, including not only Timur and Shah Jahan, but also Nader Shah. We now know that it was to the latter that the inscription almost certainly referred, but Dunlop Smith did not. The upshot was yet another misidentification of a famous spinel. Like Horace Walpole before him, Dunlop Smith had looked at a beguiling red stone and found what he wanted to see. Thanks to him, Victoria’s “ruby” would be forevermore known (in every sense incorrectly) as the Timur Ruby.[16]
By this point, it was not only fake history that was starting to bedevil the spinel. The item was losing not just its authentic provenance but its entire identity as a gemstone. By the time the Timur Ruby was being misattributed in the 1910s, spinel had come to be defined in unflattering contrast to the ruby and as a subset of it. A gemstone that had been the most prized of all was increasingly discounted as something of little worth, a poor imitator of the ruby to which it had once been deemed preferable. As is often the case with bad reputations, the spinel’s was too easily earned, and would prove incredibly difficult to shake off.
* * *
In 1892 the British jeweler Edwin Streeter was publicizing a new edition of his guide to precious stones, and turned his attention to the subject of fakes. The Otago Daily Times reported him sharing the story of a customer who had brought family heirlooms to him for valuation, only to be told that the blue stones purporting to be sapphires were in fact worthless imitations. “But paste is not the only substitute for real gems,” the report continued. “The spinel and the balas, the one a lively poppy red, the other a violet rose, frequently usurp the dignity of a true ruby…the pure ruby of ten carats is almost beyond valuation, while the other stones, called by the same name, are only of trifling value.”[17] How had a gemstone once admired for its distinctive properties, esteemed and valued above the ruby, become a dirty word in the jewelry trade?
One significant factor was the emergence of the science of gemmology, which subjected gemstones to increasingly detailed scrutiny that allowed for finer distinctions to be made. As the study of gems became more professional, the reputation of the spinel seemed to sink with it. In 1783 the pioneering French crystallographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Romé de l’Isle established the difference in crystal structure between the trigonal ruby and the cubic spinel, using new equipment to measure the angles along different faces precisely. Then in 1812 the German mineralogist Friedrich Mohs published his scale of mineral hardness, confirming that ruby and spinel also differed on this measure: ruby was 9 on the scale, while spinel was at 8. Whereas spinel’s earlier Eastern admirers had esteemed the stone for its core attributes of striking size and carmine color, the early Western gemmologists increasingly highlighted the same gem for all that it was not: those same things that made it different from, but in their eyes lesser than, the ruby.
At the same time as spinel was being distinguished empirically from ruby, it was also being lumped together with it in its nomenclature. Initially, early references to “balas” in the thirteenth century were quite distinct.[18] When variations of the term “spinel” were introduced in the sixteenth century, they referred to stones now coming from Burma, while the “balas” remained what the Persians had dubbed la’al-e Badakshī (the red stone of Badakhshan). But by the nineteenth century, jewelers began to refer not only to “balas rubies” but also “spinel rubies” as varieties of spinel that, Streeter emphasized, should be “readily distinguished from the true or Oriental Ruby, with which it has been sometimes confounded.”[19] The message was clear: ruby was the prince of red stones and spinel the pauper.
In the hands of European gem specialists,[*8] spinel was suffering a dual misfortune: either it was being classified as an inferior ruby or it was actually being mistaken for one. With so many different names and terms floating about, it was only too easy for the material to be misidentified or wrongly described. What had been referred to as “balas ruby” or “spinel ruby” soon simply became ruby. Queen Victoria’s reference to the spinels in her collection as “rubies” suggests how widely this broad brush may have spread. With friends like these, spinel needed no enemies. Rather than being allowed to flourish in its own right—as la’al had done in the hands of its Mughal and Persian admirers—spinel was becoming entirely subsumed within the ruby’s increasingly dominant brand.
Spinel’s reputation was also a victim of circumstance in the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s and 1890s the craze for Burmese rubies was entering full swing: the British annexation of northern Burma in 1885–86 opened up the exploitation of the Mogok mines, backed by investors including the London bank of N. M. Rothschild. Excitement was intense: when their exploration company, Burma Ruby Mines Ltd., was floated on the London Stock Exchange in February 1889, such a large scrum descended in search of shares that Lord Rothschild had to climb up a ladder “in a burglarious fashion” to escape the crowd and get into his office.[20] Although both spinel and ruby are found in the Mogok region (a coincidence that undoubtedly led to even more confusion), these nineteenth-century prospectors were only after one form of red gold, and that was ruby.
The spinels mined in Burma were not a patch on their cousins from Badakhshan: bright red at their best, but far from the same mighty size. Ruby was the prize in Burma, and Mogok became famous as the “Valley of Rubies.” The weight of the jewelry industry swung firmly behind marketing ruby as the red stone of choice, with the strong support of one person in particular. Edwin Streeter was an opportunistic gem dealer and jeweler, an influential figure whose professional opinion was strongly sought after, but he was also one of the key financial backers of Burma Ruby Mines Ltd. When he deprecated the spinel in comparison to the “Oriental” (i.e., Burmese) ruby, he was speaking not just as a respected industry figure but as a major investor in Burma Ruby Mines Ltd., who may have been expressing his commercial interests as much as his professional opinion. It was paramount that ruby prices rocketed, and if that was at the cost of the once-hallowed spinel, so be it.
However they were motivated, these efforts contributed to a clear divergence in both the reputation and the valuation of the two red stones. And it was not just marketing that made the difference. The mineralogical distinction between ruby and spinel only served to make the increasingly sought-after ruby rarer, and therefore more valuable. By contrast, spinel was falling from grace, a reality reflected by tumbling prices. In the 1892 edition of his study, Streeter cited an inventory of the French Crown Jewels from 1791, which valued a 56.75-carat “spinel ruby” at £2,000 and a 20.38-carat “balas ruby” at £400, before cautioning (one assumes again not without bias): “it should be stated that at the present day the stones would not fetch one-tenth of such prices. Today,” Streeter continued, “the Spinels are not much cared for.”[21]
That statement would become even more profound in light of the final loss of face in the spinel story. Just a few years earlier, French chemist Auguste Verneuil had discovered the flame fusion process, a method by which corundum—and soon, spinel—could be chemically and structurally re-created in a furnace. By the 1930s, synthetic spinel had become commercially available, easy and cheap to manufacture and in a range of different colors that were produced to imitate other gems.[*9] [22] It would also become the mainstay of American class or graduation rings, so widely worn in the United States that the word “spinel” would become a byword for “fake” in some circles.[23] It looked like the final nail in the coffin for the once-illustrious spinel.
The damage done by Streeter and synthetics would be long-lasting but not permanent. If the history of gemstones teaches us anything, it is that no stone’s story is ever entirely told, and changes in fortune may lie just around the corner. The field gemmologist and spinel enthusiast Vincent Pardieu has described how a new find was physically dropped into his hand in 2001, when he was working in Myanmar: “stunning little gems with a bright neon pinkish red color, convincing me that spinels could equal rubies in beauty.”[24] These gems were unlike any spinels ever seen before: vivid pink octahedral crystals lacking any of the “dark tone” seen in other examples. On that basis, and with a recent Star Wars film in the back of his mind, Pardieu christened them “Jedi spinels,” a name that rather appealed to the trade. Dosed up with high quantities of chromium, these hot pink pebbles came from Burma’s Namya and Man Sin mines, which I later visited on my own trip to Mogok. I adored these little miracles of nature. Unlike the Badakhshani spinels that were historically found in more rounded forms, the Jedis were perfect, sharp octahedral crystals, which already shone brightly when they were first pulled from the ground. It was not hard to see why the locals had dubbed such octahedra nat thwe—“polished by the spirits.”
Propelled by smarter branding than the spinel had typically enjoyed, these Jedi spinels quickly made a splash on the Asian auction circuit. Then in 2007 another remarkable discovery followed. The unearthing of a 115-pound lump of rough spinel in Mahenge, Tanzania, signaled the discovery of a significant new deposit of bright pink-red gems. The region would subsequently yield not only more red and pink stones but examples of the extremely rare cobalt-blue spinel variety that had begun to be mined in Vietnam in the 1980s.[25] In the early twenty-first century, a stone that had become moribund and unloved started to enjoy a new lease on life. In a delicious irony, its fortunes have also been boosted by the stone that was once its nemesis. The exponential rise of ruby prices has broadened the market for colored gemstones; spinel, with its wider variety of colors and remarkable clarity that requires no heat treatment, has been a clear beneficiary. Ruby’s poor substitute has started to become, in the right context, its viable alternative.
