Victoria Finlay - Jewels: a secret history

Preface

BEGINNING THE SEARCH

I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

SIR ISAAC NEWTON

Im not suggesting we stop analyzing stones, but am just proposing a better balance. The heart of our product is its beauty and the romance surrounding it. Todays gemmology is too often a heartless shell. We are selling illusion. We need to become conjurors.

RICHARD HUGHES

When traditional Russian icon painters begin work on a new piece, they start by covering a simple wooden panel with a mixture of chalk and glue. The whiteness will shine out from the finished painting, representing the purity of the human soul. Then they give their saints shape and color, using paints made of traditional materialsbright blue from Afghan mines, pale green from corroded copper, deep red from Spanish mercury. Then, if the icon is a special one, they cover most of the picture with gold, often leaving only the saints face to peer out of a little window. And the final step, if it is a very special icon indeed, is to set precious stones around it. They do this because, while the paint represents the earth, the jewels are the symbols of heaven.

My first book was inspired by those paint materials: the twigs, stones, and beetles that are the raw materials of human art. But as I was researching it I often heard stories about jewelsthose other, more famous, sources of color. I heard of how people were once hanged for picking up amber pebbles from the beaches of northern Europe; how the deepest color for black was named after a rare jewel formed by the same process as coal; how Christopher Columbus was thrown into prison for not admitting to his royal sponsors that he had found pearls; and, perhaps most extraordinary of all, I heard how, with recent discoveries of how to make gem-quality diamonds in laboratories, the market for the most precious stones is tottering on the edge of change.

And then I was given a ring. It is an engagement ring, and its three small square stonesone pale green, like chewing gum; one dark green, like a sea-worn bottle; and one deep red, like a smooth brickare made of glass. They dont have a carat value like most jewels but they do have a wonderful story. They are eight hundred years old, and they were scraped from a wall almost eighty years ago, by a boy who later became a bishop, in a place whose sacred beauty had affected the lives of entire empires.

Perhaps the greatest church in Christendom is the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which was once Constantinople, the capital of Byzantine Christianity for many centuries. But in 1453 the Muslims captured the city, and the Hagia Sophia became a mosque. This was greatly resented by many people over the centuries, including one Christian boy who grew up there in the 1920s. He and his friends sometimes pretended to be Muslim and went up to the womens section in the gallery, put their hands behind their backs, and pretended to pray while they prized out the mosaic stones from the wall to sell to tourists in the marketplace. When this boy grew up he became a priest, then a metropolitan, or Orthodox bishop, and he forgot his childish mischief. But one day, some years ago when he was very old, he found his three last stones and gave them to my fianc. Later, when we decided to make them into an engagement ring, they became jewels in their own rightand a reminder to me of how the most precious thing about stones in a jewel box is not always their rarity, their size, or their perfection. It is their stories.

So, with my new ring on my finger, I set off on journeys to find themnot so much the gems as the stories behind them. The search took me to the greatest gem fair in the world; to the ancient City of Jewels in Sri Lanka; to Burma to visit the fabled ruby mines of Mogok; to the Japanese village where a young noodle-seller dreamed of growing pearls in oysters; to Antwerps busy diamond district; and to California, to meet a man whose father invented emeralds, and who himself has found a way to make perfect yellow diamonds.

This book is, mostly, written in praise of small things. There are a few boulders in its pages, but they are really just for show. Even the biggest jewels are mostly rather small: the word in English comes from the Old French for little joys and in gem terms the phrase hens egg usually means gigantic. The book is also, largely, a celebration of mineral things. Only jet, coral, and the creatures that reluctantly make up the insides of some rare pearls have ever been alive, while other prized stones, including amber, plant-opals, and ordinary pearls, have exuded and/or been extruded from living things. But most gems are crystals that have formed in the depths of the earth and emerged millionsor in one case hundredsof years later, with a beauty for which men and women have, on occasion, been prepared to commit theft, treason, torture, and murder.