Precious, p.4
Precious, page 4
The remarkable status of emeralds as one of the most widely appreciated and longest-loved gems of all has persisted through history despite their intrinsic flaws. The chromium and vanadium that give them their incomparable color are, after all, impurities. And the emeralds that enraptured ancient audiences would have been poor specimens compared to the carat-rich crystals that the mines of Colombia, Zambia, and Brazil have produced in recent centuries. But that emeralds are hard to find, tricky to work with, and inherently imperfect as gemstones has only added to their attraction. Almost every civilization in recorded history has valued them not because they are dazzlingly flawless, but because they are complex—often as difficult to understand completely as they are to see through entirely. Perhaps more than any other gemstone, the emerald is a mirror of humanity: flawed, fragile, and all the more captivating for these faults. It is the mother nature of precious stones: humanity’s longest loved and most broadly appreciated gem, one that speaks a universal language transcending barriers of time and culture. We prize the emerald because its existence is miraculous, and its appearance symbolizes so many of the things we long for in life: the promise of growth, the guarantee of health, and the prospect of birth, rebirth, and enduring legacy.
Skip Notes
*1 During their early colonization of Colombia, the Spanish had learned of a ritual whereby the newly elected leader of the local Muisca people would cover himself in gold dust (the original El Dorado, literally “The Golden One”), take a raft filled with gold and emeralds into the middle of a lake, then throw them in as offerings. This story was the impetus for a Spanish expedition mounted in 1536, which would ultimately result in the discovery of the local emerald mines. The lake has been identified as Lake Guatavita, and multiple efforts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries were made to drain it to recover its secret treasures, none with much success.
*2 In the beryl family, pure beryllium aluminum silicate is the colorless goshenite, named after the town of Goshen in Massachusetts where it was first found; aquamarine is the bluish-green variety named from the Latin for “seawater” and colored by iron; pink morganite, colored by traces of manganese, is named after the banker J. P. Morgan, who donated many mineral specimens to the American Museum of Natural History; and yellow heliodor, literally “gift from the sun” in Greek, is another iron-colored beryl.
*3 Pliny’s Natural History—an encyclopedic tome of thirty-seven books on the natural world—was published posthumously by his nephew, Pliny the Younger. As well as a naturalist, Pliny the Elder was a naval commander; in a.d. 79 he was stationed at Misenum across the Bay of Naples from Pompeii when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Just as he was observing the huge pyroclastic cloud that had appeared and was making preparations to set out by sea to observe it, he received a letter from a stranded friend begging for help and duly turned his trip into a rescue mission. His friend was saved, but Pliny, taken ill at the end, never returned.
*4 In this case, it is worth noting that the ancient concept of smaragdus most likely encompassed other green gem materials, meaning that what we would today consider “imitation” might not have been what the Romans considered to be fake. Man-made simulants like glass, however, as well as other materials shaped to look like natural hexagonal emerald crystals, were clearly intentional copies.
*5 This law seems to have been put in place in response to, quite literally, unbridled luxury among the masses: “No one shall hereafter be permitted to decorate the bridles and saddles of his horses, or his own belts with pearls, emeralds, or hyacinths [sapphires], or to insert them therein. We, however, permit them to adorn the bridles and saddles of their horses, and their own belts, with other jewels.”
*6 Under Ottoman rule, the wearing of green turbans was a privilege extended only to acknowledged descendants of Muhammad.
*7 The emerald brooch was the beginning of Elizabeth Taylor’s unbroken love affair with the Italian jeweler Bulgari: “the only word she knows in Italian,” Burton once claimed. “I introduced Liz to beer, she introduced me to Bulgari.”
*8 In 2015, Christie’s sold a superb 10.11-carat Afghani gem, which physically stopped me in my tracks when I saw it on view in Hong Kong. Its color and clarity were better than those of any emerald I had ever seen, and I knew then that it would give Colombian stones a run for their money: it sold for double the previous world record, achieving more than $200,000 per carat. Two years later that mark was exceeded again, and the top emerald spot returned to Colombia when the Rockefeller Emerald—which became known as the Rockefeller-Winston Emerald as the buyer was the famous jeweler Harry Winston—fetched $305,500 for each of its 18.04 carats.
2
Ruby
The Leader of Gems
When a ruby exceeds [five carats], and is perfect, it is sold for whatever is asked for it.
—Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, 1676
“Keep your head down. Don’t even look out of the window.”
I was in the back of a car heading to the gem mines of Myanmar’s northern Mogok region, earth’s most famous source of the ruby in its brightest, deepest, and richest red form. A legendary location for gem hunters, Mogok had long been one of my dreams to visit, but it was also tinged with difficulty and danger. The Venetian explorer Niccolò de’ Conti was the first Westerner to report on this mineral Mecca in the fifteenth century. He had traveled in disguise as a local merchant and now I was similarly being told, in no uncertain terms, to stay out of sight.
At the time I visited, Myanmar was still under an American trade embargo and outsiders were effectively banned from the region I was trying to access. My Burmese friends, fellow gemmologists Hpone Phyo Kan Nyunt and Kyaw Thu,[*1] had helped me get around this with special passes and permits, but knew better than to risk the attention of any opportunists we might encounter on the long drive from Mandalay, a seven-hour slog up the winding mountain pass known as the “road of 999 bends.” They told me that if the wrong people caught sight of us, with my blonde hair in the back of our four-by-four, I was at risk of being kidnapped.
Most of the journey had passed quietly, not unusual in Burmese company, but toward the end Hpone struck up an uncharacteristic spurt of conversation. He was peppering me with questions, clearly trying to distract me. And then, around yet another corner, I realized why. We had climbed, climbed, and climbed, and suddenly here it was, looming above us. An arch carrying a sign that I had longed to see ever since I joined the jewelry trade—our equivalent of the big white letters in the Hollywood Hills.
“Welcome to Ruby Land.”
I was finally here, about to tread what is sacred ground in the gem world, a pilgrim completing their journey. My friend, very thoughtfully, had been drawing my attention away so I would not see the famous sign until it was literally towering over us. I am not ashamed to admit that, as I took it in, I felt tears stinging my eyes.
The view from the mountains we had driven up, down to the valley in which the ruby mines, glinting gold pagodas, and red rooftops of Mogok are nestled, is one that has long captivated visitors. “As I look out upon the tortured granite peaks of Mogok, I endeavor to appreciate the stupendousness of [its] antiquity,” the British Army officer and explorer Colin Metcalfe Enriquez wrote in 1930. “It is as if the gods had favored the Winding Valley with their beautiful jewels—red ruby and blue sapphire—and their loveliest blossoms—from temperate peach to tropical orchid—and as if man, for once in his life, had decided to leave Nature alone.”[1]
This Winding Valley is not just a remarkable vista to admire from above. It is also home to one of the most important gem deposits in the world: the Mogok Stone Tract, 70 square miles of gem-containing rock that lies 7,700 feet above sea level. From this magical ground have emerged the most remarkable red stones anywhere on earth. Rubies were being extracted from it and used as tribute by the eleventh century a.d. and had quite possibly been commercially mined as early as the sixth century. They were almost certainly discovered even earlier: a favored legend dating to the first century a.d. depicts a naga—mythological half-snake, half-human—laying three eggs, one of which birthed the king of Bagan, the second an emperor of China, and the third the rubies that would be scattered across the valley.[2]
Like all rubies, the stones mined in Mogok are a simple crystalline aluminum oxide compound known as corundum, colored red by traces of chromium. But unlike the majority of those found elsewhere, Burmese rubies combine the two most desired traits in the red stone: a depth and richness of hue, and an almost supernatural glow emitted when the chromium fluoresces under ultraviolet light, throwing red rays back into the eye of the observer. As is the case with every gemstone, the quality of a ruby depends on minuscule variations in mineralogy, the tipping of the scale one way or the other making all the difference in how a gem will be perceived and valued. The best rubies have a high chromium content, the source of their vital and revered redness: too little, and instead you get a less valuable pink sapphire. But they must also lack something: the iron content so common in certain ruby deposits, including those found in Cambodia and Thailand, and many of the African stones.
Where iron is present in any meaningful quantity, fluorescence cannot follow, draining the ruby of its apparently magical ability to glow, and dousing the inner fire that has been central to its mystique through history and across cultures. The rubies of Mogok are effectively iron-free: the outstanding (though by no means only) examples of rubies that appear to contain something improbably vibrant, an internal life all their own that invites comparison with the great forces of nature that share their color—the sun, fire, and human blood. This fluorescence is the Burmese ruby’s greatest magic trick, creating the impression of an even redder color than the ruby actually possesses. Such light-emitting property is not just for show. It has found important practical uses, including in laser technology: a synthetic ruby laser was used to produce the first accurate measure of the distance between the earth and moon in 1969.[3]
The secret of the Mogok ruby’s signature hue and glow lies partly in the rock that bears it—ghost-white marble, which began its life as limestone before its fate was altered by one of earth’s great geological events, the tectonic collision of the Indian subcontinent with the rest of Asia approximately 50 million years ago. These two landmasses didn’t just nudge together—they rammed at full speed, having closed a gap of 4,000 miles that once contained an entire ocean, the Tethys Sea.[*2] Although not entirely understood, it is thought that the first collision was followed by a much greater impact 25 million years later, approximating to the time when the rubies and sapphires of Burma seem to have been forming.
What followed was a geological roller coaster: the limestone on the submerged ocean’s floor was first forced downward, where it metamorphosed under extreme heat and pressure into marble. Then into this spanking clean stone came an intrusion of liquid granite, draining the marble of its silica content, the common-as-muck mineral that also prevents rubies from forming (by combining with the aluminum itself, in preference to oxygen). Finally, and most dramatically, the continued movement of the two continents after they had bashed into each other created a gradual squeezing and upward buckling effect that continues today, forming the Himalayas and the “ruby belt” of white marble that the mountains contain.[4]
That seam of pale host rock stretches across the mountain range, spawning rubies from Afghanistan and Tajikistan in the west to Vietnam in the east. All have produced rubies with similar characteristics, and at times of outstanding quality, just not as frequently or reliably as Burma. Consistency, continuity, and longevity are behind the reputation of many historic gemstone origins, and it is Myanmar that has both the longest and the deepest association with the ruby, making it the spiritual heartland of the stone.
The two factors that often set Burmese rubies apart—color and fluorescence—are not just intrinsic to their visual appeal. They also help to explain the belief system that has grown up around the ruby throughout its recorded existence: that it is a gem redolent of blood and fire, a symbol of power and protection, a stone strong enough to fight with and valuable enough to fight over. These are the associations that have made the ruby revered through history, and the most highly prized and commercially valuable colored gemstone in the world. Its superlative status is summed up by its Sanskrit names, Ratnanayaka (King of Precious Gemstones) and Ratnaraj (Leader of Gems).
The notion that the ruby contains a visceral power—something akin to lifeblood—is tied up in its earliest mythology. The Garuda Purana, one of a body of Hindu texts centering on the deity Vishnu, depicts the downfall of Vala, a demon who had defeated several demigods and appeared invincible. When he is finally destroyed by the gods through trickery, his body parts are scattered over the earth—the bones becoming diamond, the teeth pearls, the eyes sapphire, and his blood rubies.[5] This association translated across time and different cultures. The fourteenth-century Arab scientist al-Akfani described the finest ruby as having “the colour of the fresh seed of pomegranate or of a drop of blood (drawn from an artery) on a highly polished silver plate.”[6]
Blood has perennially been one of the ruby’s primary associations, closely connected to the belief that it could convey protection from harm. Warriors in Burma took this notion to extremes, cutting themselves and inserting rubies under their skin in the hope of protection in the battle to come.[7] Over time that fundamental link between the ruby and lifeblood has evolved, taking on a medicinal connotation—with the ruby considered a healing gem for blood and heart disorders in Ayurvedic tradition—and ultimately becoming an indelible symbol of passion and love, a representation of the heart. As is the case for many colored gemstones, the journey of its associations has matured from physical to medical and finally emotional—from being a symbol of blood itself to being a figment of what we hold deepest in our hearts.
So universal is the ruby’s connection with life and blood that the metaphor has even been taken up by the gem industry, which uses the term “pigeon blood” to describe the finest (and most expensive) red gems. Used as a quality designation that is somewhat subjective, and often debated, in the strictest sense it denotes several key attributes.[8] A “pigeon blood” ruby (from the Burmese ko twe, and probably named for the red irises of some breeds of the bird) should display a pure and evenly distributed red color (a tinge of pink or purple is allowed), strong saturation (intensity of color), a minimum of fractures or other distracting inclusions, and of course the high fluorescence that provides the ruby’s true magic. For many, a “pigeon blood” ruby must also be untreated, and specifically unheated: no human intervention other than faceting and polishing is allowed to assist its natural state. Almost exclusively, rubies designated “pigeon blood” have come from Mogok: most other examples fail in some way to meet the punishing threshold, whether because of iron content that suppresses fluorescence, excessive inclusions, or a lightness of tone and lack of color saturation that pushes a ruby into the territory of being a pink sapphire.[*3] [9]
If the ruby’s color (Latin ruber, “red”) explains the link to blood and vitality, its quality of fluorescence illuminates a second fundamental association—with fire and the sun. This sense of an otherworldly power was evident in early Hinduism, which associated the ruby’s inner glow with divine power and frequently made offerings of the stone to the gods.[*4] [10] The ruby’s link to the power of the sun is also consecrated in the classic gem combination of the navaratna (Sanskrit, “the nine gems”), an arrangement of gems popular across Asia as a symbol of health and good fortune, featuring on rings, necklaces, bracelets, and maang tikka (jewels worn on the forehead, especially by brides). In the navaratna, the ruby sits at the center, representing the sun, with eight other gems clustering around it as metaphorical planets.
These symbolic links with human and planetary life forces have lent the ruby a long-standing association with power, and the people who wield it. The fourteenth-century travel writer Sir John Mandeville described how the people of Java ratified their rulers by awarding them a prized piece of ruby jewelry: “when they choose their king, they take him that ruby to bear in his hand…And that ruby he shall bear always about his neck, for if he had not that ruby upon him men would not hold him for king.”[11] The ruby has enjoyed widespread use in this way as a signifier of authority: not only the leader of precious stones, but the precious stone of leaders. In China’s Qing dynasty, formal headwear including gemstone decorations was introduced for government officials in the 1720s: while middle-ranking mandarins wore hats decorated with rock crystal, coral, and sapphire, the most senior of nine ranks would wear a ruby, or a stone that closely resembled one, as a sign of their standing.[12]
Whether marking out mandarins, designating kings, or being embedded into the skin of warriors, the ruby as a symbol of power has carried a strongly masculine connotation. This is a male jewel in many ways: one that is not sifted from soft soil but hewn from solid rock, and whose associations are visceral, redolent of battles for power and the spilling of blood, from the demon Vala’s downfall to its use as a talisman in war. This masculine bent is reinforced by the fact that no woman—considered a potential source of bad luck—is allowed down the mines in Mogok: a chance of fate that would unexpectedly work in my favor when I got there. Women are, however, closely involved in the industry. They represented the majority of those selling stones in and around the mining area, and by tradition kanasé women were allowed to sift through the “tailings” washed out of the mines as detritus to rescue any smaller gems. Most surprisingly, the manager of the largest mine I visited was female, a schoolteacher now in charge of more than one hundred miners. But the mineshafts themselves are an exclusively and closely guarded male province. Just as the ruby itself is often a man’s gemstone, the source of its most famous examples is, at its heart, still a man’s world.
