Precious, p.7
Precious, page 7
After the initial delight at my warm, although unconventional, welcome, I became suddenly aware of the expectation this association would leave behind. What if they didn’t make a new discovery this time? Remarkably, I received a message some weeks later that another notable find had followed that second visit; at this point, I would have friends for life.
I was not the only good-luck charm at the mine. Although the majority of workers are Buddhist, many mines had almost unnoticeable small stand-alone shrines dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu. It was explained to me that, while he was not their deity, he was still a protector of Sri Lanka, who needed respect for the country’s riches to show themselves. The message was clear: when it comes to a business as dependent on luck as sapphire mining, you must appease all possible influences, and do everything in your power to shift fate in your favor.
* * *
The history of sapphires is shot through with chance discoveries, reinforcing its status as a stone forever entwined with both fate and fortune. The sapphires of Montana, the only American state where they are commercially extracted, were first discovered by prospectors during the Gold Rush of the 1860s, who in their myopic search often deemed the blue pebbles irrelevant. When they were finally examined and identified at Tiffany’s in New York by the gemmologist George Frederick Kunz, he declared them “the finest precious gemstones ever found in the United States.”[3]
A century later, Montana sapphires began enjoying a renaissance, thanks in part to a massive deposit at a site known as Rock Creek, a spot I visited up in the Rockies during the summer-mining months that sounded more like the location of a spaghetti Western than a sapphire mine. High in the hills and surrounded by firs, the area was as beautiful as a film set, but my stay there involved an isolated wood cabin, a temperamental generator that needed coaxing in the middle of the night, and a wooden door riddled with bullet holes: reminders not to linger too long outdoors at night among the bears and mountain lions. Here there were unique risks of mining in remote environments, and a reminder of the chance occurrences that could play out either way. In sharp contrast to history, I joined the Montana miners in search of sapphires as their primary quest, while microscopic gold dust became only an ancillary dividend to profits.
Sapphires had been unearthed similarly by chance in New South Wales during Australia’s first gold speculation in 1851. This time, Australian sapphires were accidentally identified when one prospector sent off red gems for testing in the hope they were rubies; they turned out to be garnets, but tiny sapphires were also hiding in the gravel. Australia would become one of the world’s biggest sapphire producers by volume in the years to come.[4]
Yet the most glittering accident in the history of sapphires belongs to Kashmir, producer of the most highly valued examples ever mined. The market premium of these stunners is underpinned by both their quality and their rarity: the choicest finds were made during the few decades following the original discovery in the 1880s, and the peak mining years were seemingly over by the late 1930s. While sporadic Kashmir sapphire discoveries have been made since, nothing has rivaled this window of discovery ever again, arguably in the entire world of gems. Even while the mines were extant, they could only be exploited during a fleeting summer season when the snows cleared and the ground unfroze sufficiently to permit digging. Chance and scarcity have been at the heart of the story of these gems ever since they first came to light.
The story of that discovery is as seductive as the deep blue that makes the Kashmir sapphire so highly prized. At some point around 1880 a landslide occurred in the Kudi Valley, in Kashmir’s Padar region, near the village of Sumjam, revealing a primary deposit of sapphires at an altitude of approximately 15,000 feet. One version of the story is that a goatherd was walking along when a blue stone fell out of the mountainside into his path. Tom LaTouche, a geologist commissioned to study the deposit in 1887, related an alternative tale that had been told to him: a shikari (hunter), looking for something with which to strike a light for his pipe, chanced upon a sapphire, “and finding that it answered his purpose better than the ordinary fragments of quartz he was in the habit of using, carried it about with him for some time, and eventually sold it to a Laholi trader, by whom it was taken to Simla, where its value was recognised.”[5]
Whatever the true origin, there was no doubting the dazzling quality of the sapphires that had emerged. Naturally occurring blue colors are rare enough, but the blue of the Kashmir sapphire is something extraordinary, enticing for its depth of color and the paradoxical quality that makes it intense yet somehow gentle, both piercing the gaze and inviting the eye. Its hue is almost a special effect, created not just by the bonding of iron and titanium that causes the natural color, but by minuscule inclusions of crystalline dustlike particles that deflect and intensify certain wavelengths of the incoming light. This is, remarkably, the same Rayleigh scattering effect of sunlight in the atmosphere that leads us to perceive the sky as blue. A similar light effect has been found in a few sapphires from the more recent deposits of Madagascar, and even Sri Lanka, but nothing can rival the optical and historical magic surrounding the stones of Kashmir. These sapphires seem to exhibit a special subtle blue glow, an almost indescribable life fighting its way out of the stone through their vivid yet gentle color. While the particles create additional blue light, they also soften its transmission: a mesmerizing combination of soft blue fire I like to call “electric velvet.” These are stones you could look at forever, as magnificent and multifaceted as the sky they are often held to represent.
It is the sapphire’s blue color that has been responsible for much of its long-standing financial value and cultural significance. Above all, it has created an ongoing association with the heavens and heavenly power. Rulers and bishops in the Middle Ages wore sapphires to assert both their power and their divine right to it. Charlemagne, one of the most powerful emperors who ever lived, was supposedly buried wearing his “Talisman,” an imposing pendant featuring a 190-carat pale-blue sapphire identified as Sri Lankan in origin, and one of the largest used in a piece of ancient jewelry. It is thought to have been recovered from his neck after his corpse was exhumed in the year 1000 by Emperor Otto III. In 1804 the Talisman was presented to Empress Josephine, consort of Napoleon, together with a fragment of the arm of Charlemagne himself.[*5] [6]
The association of blue with status and virtue is deeply rooted in culture, art, and religious iconography in the West. You will struggle, for example, to find a stained-glass window or painting featuring the Virgin Mary in which she is not dressed at least partly in blue. As the color of the sky, the hue of the heavens, blue denotes the right of a ruler to hold earthly power. Its closeness to purple—the color of kings, thanks to the most valuable pigment in antiquity, dye extracted from the purple murex snail—has also reinforced its royal connections. In the Book of Exodus, when the ceremonial garments of the Jewish high priest (kohen gadol) are described in detail, it is stipulated that the tunic be made “completely of blue cloth.” A drape of the same material was supposedly used to cover the Ark of the Covenant, the relic box containing the stone tablets on which the Ten Commandments had been inscribed. When God appears to Moses to give him the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written, under his feet were slabs of “sappheiros,” also interpreted as the material for the tablets themselves.[7] There is a parallel in Persian mythology, in which the earth itself rests on a giant sappheiros, reflecting its blue color onto the sky.[*6]
Yet despite their close association with royalty and divinity, the heavens and the sky, sapphires are not necessarily always blue in color. Through the magic of chemistry, sapphires can span the whole spectrum depending on the “coloring elements” that enter their mixture. In a case of art imitating nature, it really is a matter of mixing the right trace elements, as on an artist’s palette, to get the right shades. The bonding of titanium with iron within the corundum crystal structure creates the blue of sapphire. Iron alone can induce yellow or green, which also tends to have some of the blue elements present. Chromium in sufficient quantities can create the red of ruby, and, in lesser amounts, the near-red of pink sapphires. For orange, a mixture of chromium and iron will do the trick, also producing the super-special and highly sought after “padparadscha” sapphires, an unusual combination of pastel pink and orange. Named after the Sinhalese for lotus flower, “pads,” as they are more affectionately known, are variably (and somewhat more and less romantically) compared in color to sunsets and salmon.
What nature has not achieved, man sometimes can, with heat treatment often used to bring out the color of a sapphire or change it entirely. The right application of heat can bond existing traces of titanium and iron to remove any yellow, turning a green sapphire blue, lighten or darken the tone of a blue stone, or minimize the inclusions inside that detract from its appearance.[*7]
In the case of some sapphires, the appearance of inclusions can unusually add value. These are star sapphires, cut with a rounded cabochon surface, over which a six-armed star seems to float. This effect, known as asterism, can only exist if the sapphire contains enough intersecting “silk”—fine, iridescent, needlelike crystals that reflect the light in a flash of sparkling rays—yet another link connecting the stone to associations with the sky.
Those inclusions may hold the key to one of the most important and hotly debated questions about sapphire: where it is from and what value it correspondingly holds. All sapphires are old, but some are strikingly more so than others. In the case of Sri Lankan and Madagascan stones—two islands whose geological similarities can be explained by the fact they were once both jammed up against what is now East Africa—they were both formed more than half a billion years ago. In contrast, sapphires from Burma and Kashmir may have been created as recently as 20–25 million years ago.[8] Brilliant modern developments in gemmological research—such as the dating of certain inclusions affected by radioactive decay, like zircon—have made it possible in some cases to assess the age of a sapphire and adduce its likely origin. Yet determining the origin is a fiddly, controversial, and endlessly debated subject. It is not uncommon to encounter sapphires with multiple gemmological reports each specifying a different geological origin. These are important distinctions when a Kashmir sapphire can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars per carat, ten times more than a stone from the still-producing Madagascan mines.
The rarity and undeniable beauty of the Kashmir sapphire makes it one of the most expensive and sought-after colored gemstones. But sapphires are about so much more than provenance and price per carat. These gems with their heavenly hues and royal resonance often have a value beyond the financial, their beauty residing as much in the deep personal meaning they represent as the way they catch and scatter the light. As I would later discover, it did not take the most remarkable examples of the gemstone to create one of the most significant sapphire jewels that the world has yet seen.
* * *
Queen Victoria’s sapphire and diamond coronet is a piece I had long admired from afar before I was lucky enough to see it up close and even handle it. I had already come to know this royal favorite via the depictions that made it famous: the 1842 portrait by Winterhalter, two years after she had married Albert, in which she still appears almost schoolgirlish, the coronet encircling a bun of brown hair at the back of her head; and the 1874 painting by Henry Graves, a melancholy side profile in which the aging queen sits reading, many years after her husband’s death, a hand raised defensively to her face, the coronet almost lost in the lace of her ubiquitous white widow’s cap.
Then it caught me by surprise, when I visited Harewood House—an aristocratic estate in the North of England—to bring some pieces for display and was shown around by the countess. We were walking through the living room discussing the countess’s pearl collection when I suddenly saw a photograph on the piano of her wearing the coronet. Because it was not a royal jewel but a personal one, a gift to young Queen Victoria from her beloved husband, Albert, it had passed down in private family ownership, subsequently a wedding present from King George V to his only daughter, Princess Mary, when she married the future 6th Earl of Harewood in 1922. My eyes must have been out on stalks because the countess saw me looking. Before I could even ask if she still had it, she paused just for a moment and looked down. “No. Not anymore.”
This was several years before the coronet became newly notorious, when it was purchased in 2016 for $6.5 million by an overseas buyer, before being subjected to an export ban by the British government. A year later, with the support of great patrons of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Bollinger family, it was bought for the museum and saved for the nation. It was while its permanent display was being prepared that it surprised me for the second time, during what I thought was a routine visit for a cup of tea with the curator. We were walking through one of the galleries when, disarmingly offhand, he asked if I had seen the coronet. I was over the moon when, back in his office, he modestly produced this national treasure from the safe, presented me with a pair of blue latex gloves, and left me to delight in its every detail.
The first thing that strikes you about one of the most famous royal jewels—perhaps the favorite headpiece of the woman who for more than sixty-three years was sovereign to nearly a quarter of the people on earth—is how small it is. Even knowing that it is just 4.5 inches in diameter is no preparation to appreciate how delicate and dainty a diadem this is. Whereas the Crown Jewels declaim wealth, power, and rule by divine right, this royal jewel is personal: an intimate love gift that Prince Albert had worked closely with the jeweler Joseph Kitching to design, matching a sapphire and diamond brooch he had given Victoria the day before their wedding. Almost every part of the coronet was meaningful to the young queen, from the design, based on the rautenkranz (wreath) that featured in Albert’s coat of arms, to the inlaid sapphires, which had likely come from older heirlooms, perhaps from jewels given to her by her aunt and uncle, Queen Adelaide and King William IV.[9]
Delicate as it may seem, this is also a robust and versatile piece, one formed of twenty-three separate sections whose hinges allow it to be flexed into different shapes: the completely closed circlet favored by Victoria in her youth and in her dotage, or the 1920s bandeau that Princess Mary was later photographed sporting, opened out and worn across the forehead. It is a remarkable piece to hold and move in your hands. Its beautiful mechanisms flow effortlessly, ensuring a flexibility of fashion choices across multiple generations of owners and eras of style. Small but strong, adaptable yet defined, it epitomizes the character of the queen for whom it was originally made.
Most striking of all are the stones themselves, an unusual jumble of different shapes and sizes. Probably Sri Lankan in origin,[*8] these are not the velvet perfection of Kashmir sapphires. Clearly evident in the centermost shield-shaped gem is a common flaw of the sapphire known as “zoning,” where the iron and titanium bonding has not occurred in a particular part of the crystal, leaving a colorless band running through the blue. An ingenious jeweler’s trick has been used to conceal this blemish from a distance, enameling the setting in blue to make the color reflect back into the stone. I found these imperfections not so much shocking as endearing. They reinforced that this was a piece whose primary value to its owner was not vested in the gems themselves but the layers of family associations surrounding them.
This was a jewel that retained its relevance right across Victoria’s long reign, a piece she turned to both as a recently married woman and much later as a mourning widow. Sapphires were a symbolic gift of the passionate love that Victoria and Albert shared, and the sapphire coronet became an abiding symbol of the grief that settled over her in the years after his premature death in 1861. When five years later she finally returned to one of her most prominent duties, the state opening of Parliament, it was the coronet that she chose to don, as if wearing it were the closest thing she could muster to having him at her side.
There is of course a financial market in sapphires, which are weighed, examined, and analyzed to ascertain value. Yet like all gemstones, they can be worth so much more than the sum of their carat value and place of origin. The story of the stones, the hands they have passed through and the purpose for which they were fashioned, can be equally important. In any other context, the sapphires that bedeck Victoria’s coronet would be ordinary gems of no great significance. Instead, they have become a symbol of one of the great royal love stories and a signature of one of Britain’s most famous monarchs, helping to narrate the joys and the tragedies of her extraordinarily long reign. To observe the coronet up close or hold it in your hands is to marvel at how something so small could contain so much personal history and meaning.
The British royal connection with sapphires did not end with Albert and Victoria. The brooch that he had given her the day before they were married, and that she wore pinned onto the front of her wedding dress, was later designated as an heirloom of the Crown, to be kept within the Royal Family. “Albert’s beautiful sapphire brooch,” as she described it in her diary, has become one of the most recognizable royal adornments, used both day-to-day and on notable occasions.[10] It was worn by Queen Alexandra at her coronation alongside Edward VII in 1902, and by Queen Elizabeth II at a state dinner to mark the visit of President Kennedy in 1961, where she paired it with a blue tulle ball gown designed for the occasion by her couturier of choice, Norman Hartnell. That evening she also wore a matching suite, the sapphire and diamond necklace and earrings that her father, King George VI, had given her as a wedding present in 1947.[11] It would become a staple statement set throughout her reign, the necklace’s Victorian design altered with the addition of a pendant and bolstered by a matching bracelet made in the 1960s. Sapphires were long a sentimental choice for Britain’s longest-reigning monarch, as they were for the woman from whom she inherited the mantle, resonant with family history and personal significance.
