Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / Bejewelled I Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires
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- Bejewelled I Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires Sri Lanka may be Sapphire Centre as far as the world is concerned – but where exactly might you now find its greatest stones, and what stories have they to tell? This episode is dedicated to Uncovering Sri Lanka’s most celebrated sapphires. Whilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke, to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade. The crown upgrade is very straightforward. Get a sapphire. There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no stone sits more sumptuously on head, hand, or breast than the sapphire. The Sri Lankan sapphire, to be exact. Quite apart from the orgone light that illuminates its wearers, it is, if some sapphire traders are to be believed, a not inconsequential medical aid. Claims that it helps combat cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic – to name but a few – are widespread, albeit untested. Buddhists have long since taken this positive attitude to the stone one big step further, believing that sapphire accelerates spiritual enlightenment. Ellen Conroy, in her seminal 1921 book “The Symbolism of Colour”, quoted Buddhist texts that claimed the jewel produced peace of mind and equanimity: “it chases out evil thoughts by establishing healthy circulation. It opens barred doors to the spirit. It produces a desire for prayer. It brings peace, but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.” Like the claim for curing cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic, this claim, winsome though it is, is also untested. It is, say some Buddhists, nothing less than the transformative third eye – the one that symbolises clarity and insight, so enabling you to see beyond plain earthly things. Less happily, the Chinese, traders with the island since ancient times, believed that sapphires were the congealed tears of Buddha - though this was not how Cleopatra was reputed to see the stone, using it with lavish application ground up in her eye shadow. Clearly, though, the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires is deep and well beyond most measures of what is ancient. Gem mining here reaches back to at least the second century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa, one of the island’s most ancient chronicles. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems are to be believed, the country’s mines can be dated back at least another 700 years. 25% of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, to a lesser extent, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme age of its rocks (90% are between 500 and 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous that they often wash out onto floodplains and into rivers and streams. Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was, for a long time, the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays, brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits 5 to 500 feet deep dug and tunnels excavated horizontally from them. Sales of Sri Lanka’s gems boomed from a trifling $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022, a phenomenal acceleration promoted by two bouts of unusually effective government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act. With these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuance of gem-mining licenses and the leasing of government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exports and made it mandatory that gems discovered in mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a 2.5% share of sales. The industry’s value chain is almost as long as a piece of thread. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell to other dealers, who sell the rough rocks to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arab traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers, who often resell the rocks back to other consumers, or to retailers who resell them to new consumers. And so on, down all the ages of recorded time. But of all its many types of Sri Lankan gems, mined in apparent inexhaustible plenty, it is sapphires that anyone with the merest hint of glitter associates with the country. Eighty-five per cent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires. Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, is most commonly red, purple, pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety depending on the stone’s chemical composition. Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires. This yellow sapphire is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, as well as orange and white ones. And it is famous for a variant known as a padparadscha sapphire – from Padmaraga - a pink-orange stone, as converted as the grail or meaning of life. But despite all this, the colour that gets the most acclaim is – of course - the Blue Sapphire, the blue of inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, blue sapphires are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”. Long before Loos got round to writing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the country’s sapphires were the go-to gem for crowns, thrones, diadems, and later, accessories for First Nights and cocktail parties – and just to feeling special curled up in front of the television with a hot chocolate and a sapphire ring. Harly surprising then that over the centuries, eighteen of the island’s sapphires have won for themselves an ineradicable place in the hearts of collectors, connoisseurs, aficionados, enthusiasts, and experts. And, of course, auctioneers. Despite being made to be worn, flaunted, and noticed, all but two of the country’s most famous sapphires are either trapped in museums or lost to the public eye. One of the two you can still see worn is the Stuart Sapphire, last worn by Charles III at his coronation in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023. Arguments – all but improvable – rage gently over this 104-carat stone that sits, God, at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon it is from Sri Lanka, but its provenance is obscure, and it can only be reliably dated to Charles II and his brother, the hapless James II, the hapless exile. Less controversial is the only other famous island sapphire still worn in public today - the Princess of Wales’s Engagement Ring. Compared to the other notable sapphires given by Sri Lanka to the world, Princess Diana’s Engagement Ring, now worn by the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best described as small but perfectly formed. A mere twelve carats, this oval ring rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for his future wife, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. Her elder son later inherited it and, at some point between 2010 and 2011, resized it to fit the finger of his own fiancée, Kate Middleton, a brilliant blue reminder of Sri Lanka in any of the millions of photographs published of her around the world every week. But there, the trail of stones worn to be seen stops abruptly. Miserably, if demurely and democratically, half of the island’s most famous sapphires lie trapped within the reinforced glass cases of a handful of richly endowed museums. The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C leads the museum pack. Its collection is headed by the legendary Logan Blue Sapphire, whose 423 carats almost outnumber the combined total of the other three Sri Lankan sapphires in the collection. Flawless, the stunning stone emanates a lush cornflower blue with violet overtones and is set as a brooch, supported by twenty white diamonds. Not that anyone is allowed to wear it now. Its discovery is famously opaque. It is thought to have been mined in the early nineteenth century, cut, and polished, and then packed off to Paris for sale. After various adoring owners, it eventually passed into the hands of Robert Guggenheim, the American benefactor behind the Smithsonian’s Hall of Gems and Minerals. Guggenheim gifted the jewel to his new wife, Rebecca, around 1938. On his death, she gave the jewel to the Smithsonian. Roughly half its size is the Smithsonian’s next great Sri Lankan stone - The Star of Artaban. Once upon a time, many centuries ago, a wise man named Artaban set off from Persia to join the three Magi visiting the baby Jesus. The Bible tells us nothing about who these three wise men were. However, tradition has it that they were named Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar, and that they came from Persia, India, and Arabia, respectively. But in fact, there was a fourth - Artaban, the magi who never actually made it to Bethlehem, despite having purchased three unforgettable gems as presents, one of which was a sapphire. This vague fable, with a sapphire at its centre, provided the perfect name for a milky-blue 287-carat sapphire from Sri Lanka, whose origins are also mildly impenetrable. What little is known about the colossal stone is that it was bought in 1943 by a member of the Georgia Mineral Society and anonymously gifted to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s third fabulous sapphire is The Star of Bombay. Arguments continue over whether the gem is Sri Lankan or Indian. It was discovered during the British East India Company's rule of Sri Lanka. On the balance of probability, it seems more than likely that the 182-carat stone was mined on the island before setting off on its world travels via India. Hollywood was to be its happiest home for it was bought by Douglas Fairbanks in the 1920s for “America’s sweetheart,” his wife, Mary Pickford, the best-known woman who has ever lived. Star of the silent screen, her own fame came to an abrupt halt when sound was added to the movie mix a few years after she received her glamorous Sri Lankan sapphire. Hopefully, its unusual violet-blue colour (caused by a singular mixture of titanium, iron, and vanadium) gave her some consolation in the chattier decades that followed. On her death in 1979, it was donated to the Smithsonian. The Bismarck Sapphire, the ultimate honeymoon gift, is the lucky Museum’s fourth fabulous Sri Lankan sapphire. It was discovered on the island in 1920, though rumours within the South Asian gem trade claim it was merely sold here and originated in Burma. Whatever the truth of its provenance, it was bought by Harrison Williams, an American carpet sweeper-cum-millionaire, for his third wife, the remarkable Countess Mona von Bismarck. Mona was an artwork in her own right, named by Chanel in 1930 as "The Best Dressed Woman in the World," set to music by Cole Porter in “Ridin' High” in 1936, and painted by Salvador Dalí in 1943. Given Harrison Williams’ fortune (now valued at over 11 billion dollars), the 98.6-carat honeymoon present was but a bauble. The countess was to outlive Willaims and, at some point, between her fourth (Count Albrecht von Bismarck-Schonhausen) and fifth husband (Count Umberto de Martini), donated the jewel to the Smithsonian. Today it sits there for all to see (but never again wear), mounted in a pendant necklace of diamonds and more petite deferential sapphires. New York’s American Museum of Natural History houses two other splendid Sri Lankan sapphires in among its labyrinthine halls of stuffed animals and mannequins. The greatest of these, The Star of India, is larger than any other Sri Lankan sapphire and now holds US citizenship. Much debate and not a little earnest patriotism have gone into confirming its Sri Lankan origin. But if the ‘India’ tag in its name is wholly wrong, so too is that of ‘star’, for this much-mismnamed stone has not one but two such stars on it, making it rare beyond the dreams of avarice. The milky quality of the stone was caused by the minerals within it, which also produced its dreamy star effect, as the tiny fibres of those minerals reflected light like cat’s eyes. Its discovery may be a mystery, but its trail becomes clear in 1905 when the gem arrived in London, brought by a British army officer from Madras. It was cut by the jeweller Albert Ramsay to leave a 563.35-carat, almost flawless star sapphire. It was bought by the American millionaire J. P. Morgan. It lived an inappropriately peaceful life at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City until it was stolen in 1964 by the wonderfully named Murph the Surf. The thieves were helped by the gem’s alarm system being battery-dead – but within days, Murph and his villainous - if incompetent - cronies were arrested, and the gem returned to its museum: forever admired and never worn. The museum’s other great stone is the Midnight Star Sapphire. A deep purple-violet star gem, it gets its name from its shadowy appearance, an appropriate hue for a 116.75-carat gem with a provenance that is anything but well-lit. Most experts appear to agree that it does actually come from Sri Lanka (though their reasoning is Babylonian). Still, reliable records date back only to the end of the 19th century, when the stone was acquired by George Kunz and sold to the American financier J.P. Morgan. A lucky handful of museums outside America also house Sri Lankan sapphire, and three of the island’s most renowned sapphires live in museums in France, Russia, and the UK. The oldest by far is The Aphrodite Sapphire. Modestly sized and safely housed in a gallery of Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum, this is not simply a sapphire, almost certainly from Sri Lanka, but also one of the earliest and most beautiful Roman jewels in the world. Carved sometime in the first century, it depicts Aphrodite feeding an eagle. Centuries younger is the Talisman of Charlemagne. Attributed to the eighth-century emperor Charlemagne, The Talisman is a reliquary said to hold fragments of the Virgin Mary's hair and a remnant of the True Cross. A dazzling early medieval jewel in its own right, it bears at its centre what experts at the Palace of Tau Museum in Reims say is a 190-carat blue grey sapphire from Sri Lanka. The last matchless museum sapphire not to fall into American hands is The Empress Maria's Sapphire. The ninth-largest blue sapphire in the world, this 260.37 carat sapphire was purchased as a holiday keepsake by the empress’s husband, Tsar Alexander II, at the Great Exhibition of 1862 in London. Just the year before, the Tsar had won acclaim for emancipating Russian serfs. This liberal legacy did nothing to forestall his assassination twenty years later by People's Will, an anarchist organisation. At the time she received her gift, the Tsarina had been married for 23 years, but it was only in 1860, on the death of her formidable mother-in-law, that she came into her own and took a more decisive role at the Russian court. The Tsarina was no wallflower. Behind the scenes, she encouraged her husband to liberate the serfs, to further democratic initiatives, and to promote capitalism. The sapphire was set in an oval brooch adorned with an additional 56 carats of diamonds and, for eighteen years, was worn with stylish delight. On the Tsarina’s death in 1880, it was donated to the State Diamond Fund, which still exists today. Slip through the Borovitsky Gate in the Kremlin to see it, almost lost amidst such an orgy of other rare gems, insignia, and crown jewels as to dim the dawn itself. The final tally of seven of the island’s most significant sapphires has utterly disappeared from the public eye, even though many of them were only discovered in the past few years. Glimpsed once or twice, they now sit in private safes or Swiss banks, or perhaps on the necks of adored second, third or fourth wives from Moscow to Manhattan. Oldest of these Missing- Presumed-Glittering-in-Private-Stones is The Blue Giant of The Orient. Weighing in at 466 carats, it is one of the world’s largest sapphires - though it was rumoured to be over 600 carats when it was first discovered in 1907, pulled from the waters of the Kalu Ganga, a river that winds across the foothills of Adam’s Peak. It was bought and processed by O. L. M. Macan Markar & Co., a jeweller based in Colombo, who oversaw the cutting and polishing. Macan Markar, established in 1860, was one of the country’s preeminent jewellers, with customers including members of the British royal family. Proper cutting of the gem revealed the stone’s massive facets, yielding maximum light saturation and rendering it an impressive cornflower blue. Its life thereafter became a mystery. Valued at $7,000 in 1907, it was sold to an anonymous American buyer. For nearly a hundred years, it vanished from the public eye – to reappear unexpectedly in May 2004 at the Christie's Magnificent Jewels action catalogue in Geneva. Remarkably, it failed to sell at auction but was later sold privately for $1 million – again to a most anonymous collector - and has once again disappeared from the public eye. Its discovery was later followed by that of the Blue Belle of Asia. Rarely has a modest paddy field ever yielded so rich a crop as this, fished out from marshy rice fields near Ratnapura in 1926, and bought by O. L. M. Macan Markar & Co., it was polished and processed to reveal a 392.52-carat stone. Advertising his gem for its ‘highly prized peacock blue colour and excellent clarity,’ O. L. M. Macan Markar & Co sold it to Lord Nuffield, the founder of Morris Motors Limited, in 1937. Quite why the motor magnate wanted it is a mystery. He claimed he wished to present it to the Queen Consort, Elizabeth, on her coronation in 1937, but it was instead to vanish for thirty-five years - begging the question: Did it ever reach the Queen, or did she resell it in secret to mitigate her lavish debts? Its next public airing was in the 1970s when it was examined by the Swiss-based gem dealer, Theodore Horovitz. In 2014, it reappeared at auction and was bought for $17.29 million by a secretive, fast-disappearing Saudi collector. In a perfect example of nature obediently following Hollywood, the next sapphire, the so-called Heart of the Ocean in the film “Titanic,” was posthumously created following the film’s success as a 170-carat Ceylon blue sapphire, set with sixty-five acolyte diamonds. The sapphire replaced the inexpensive blue quartz Kate Winslet flung into the icy ocean. Celine Dion wore the recreated necklace with great acclaim in 1998, when she sang “My Heart Will Go On” at the Oscars. And as is often the way with overmighty jewellery, it vanished some years later when it was auctioned for over $2 million at a charity ball to a buyer who remains anonymous to this day. More affordable copies of the necklace can be bought on eBay for $14.88 plus postage and packaging. The size of the last four Sri Lankan sapphires beggars belief and proves that if, as Scott Fitzgerald said, there is a diamond as big as the Ritz somewhere, there is also a sapphire as big as a family dog. The first of these is The Pride of Sri Lanka. In a world where carats are king, the 856 carats of The Pride of Sri Lanka easily catapult the stone into the rarified stratosphere of Sri Lankan sapphires, twinkling in a glittering realm. It was pulled from mines in Marapanna, a few kilometres from Rathnapura, in 1998. In a year overshadowed by the new violent excesses of the civil war, its discovery, along with the country’s cricket team’s victory in the test match against England, was one of the few triumphs of the year. Displayed briefly in a glass box, it was soon to vanish altogether, bought by a buyer whose identity is still a mystery to the Inland Revenue. Nearly twenty years later, in 2015, the Star of Adam was found. Various price quotations have been given for this 1,444-carat sapphire pulled from Rathnapura’s mines - and the difference between them is more than sufficient to power the economy of a city-state for months. $100 million; $175 million; $300 million – all emerge as possible price points for this 280-ounce egg-shaped stone. What makes the stone so remarkable, size excepted, is the distinct 6-rayed star it displays, an effect known amongst jewellers as “asterism,” derived from the complex makeup of the stone itself, which produces an internal reflection. The stone’s owner, who has wisely chosen to remain anonymous, has gone to ground since announcing his interest in a sale. And then, in 2021, two stones were uncovered whose size was so vast as to evoke the mythical tears of the Buddha himself. The Serendipity Sapphire was the first of these. Weighing in at around 510 kilograms and 2.6 million carats, this is the world's largest star sapphire cluster. It was discovered in July 2021 in Kahawatte near Ratnapura – and entirely by accident, when Mr Gamage, a gem trader, set workmen to dig a well. Since its discovery, Mr Gamage has wisely chosen to remain entirely silent about his home improvement bonanza. Just a few months later, in December, the Queen of Asia was found. So used to amazing discoveries, the phlegmatic world of intentional jewellery was ill-prepared for the discovery of 310 kilograms of 1.6 million-carat blue sapphires. Unearthed in Batugedara near Ratnapura, it was dispatched for deeper examination and authentication. It was then rumoured to have been bought by a Dubai-based company – though the news trail has since gone cold. A container load of other massive sapphires has also piled up, awaiting proper authentication, each one Sri Lankan and each set to break eye-watering records for size, quality, or value. They include an orange sapphire weighing 825 carats and eight blue sapphires weighing 138, 260, 254, 856, 1200, 2516, 4002, and 8042 carats. All nine of them have disappeared from the public eye, sold on in private auctions held in hotel suites swept for bugs – and perhaps one day polished up and worn to a coronation or a pop star’s 70th birthday party. Please keep your eyes peeled for them, and don’t ever blink. In a world so often troubled by the vexations of events and occurrences, a little sparkle goes a long way. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.