The Zanskar Vary is an austerely stunning area of peaks, rivers and gorges within the northwestern Himalayas, so distant it has been known as the land ‘past the snows’.

In 1882, it all of the sudden got here into very sharp focus when a gaggle of merchants arrived in Shimla with a handful of eye-catching stones from the Padar Valley. The stones have been the velvety cornflower-blue color of a peacock’s neck, and had surfaced within the rocks following a landslide. They have been sapphires — essentially the most stunning the world had seen.

Apprised of their magnificence, the Maharaja of Kashmir swiftly dispatched guards to the realm, and from 1882 to 1887, miners labored day and night time all through the brief three-month summer season, unearthing sapphires of as much as 3 x 5 inches in measurement. When the ‘Outdated Mine’ was exhausted, the Maharaja appealed to the British Geological Survey of India for assist, and the miners moved all the way down to the valley ground.

The sapphires there have been inferior in high quality, nonetheless, and since 1927, nothing of be aware has been discovered in any respect, including rarity to the fantastic thing about these Kashmir sapphires, and lending them an virtually legendary aura.

Golconda diamonds

India’s affiliation with diamonds goes again additional, to the times of Pliny the Elder — whose Pure Historical past  (77 AD) referenced diamonds being washed from river gravel there — and past.

By the point of Marco Polo (1254-1324), diamonds from the Godavari delta in jap India have been furnishing the treasure chests of the Nice Khans of the Mongol Empire; and in 1668, the French gem service provider Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605-1689) was presenting a casket of those Golconda gems — so named after the Sultanate that owned the mines and the magnificent fortress of the identical title — to Louis XIV.

So struck was the Solar King by their luminosity and transparency that he known as the gems ‘swimming pools of crystal water’. Henceforth, solely diamonds would befit the magnificence of the sovereign, he declared, granting Tavenier a barony and ordering him to convey the diamonds to the eye of the world.

Tavernier duly printed Les Six Voyages de Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1676) and is now often known as ‘Father of the Fashionable Diamond Commerce’.

The diamonds he had proven to the King have been nitrogen-free gems that the GIA now classifies as Sort IIa diamonds, essentially the most chemically pure and clear of all diamonds on the planet. As we speak, they symbolize lower than two p.c of the world’s manufacturing of gem-quality diamonds.

The Peacock Necklace

Nearly all of the world’s most stunning and highest-valued sapphires come from Kashmir and several other have handed by way of Christie’s.

In 2015, a spectacular circular-cut sapphire of 10.33 carats, set inside a diamond encompass and mounted on a gold ring, offered for HK$19,160,000, setting a brand new file for the very best value paid per carat for a sapphire on the public sale home.

Three years later, the Peacock Necklace, set with 21 top-quality Kashmir sapphires that had taken greater than 100 years to assemble, in addition to an extra 15 years to chop and polish, fetched HK$116,537,500 at Christie’s in Hong Kong.

The ‘Mirror of Paradise’

As for the Golconda diamonds, whereas the mines closed within the mid-Nineteenth century, the title continues to be related to essentially the most celebrated diamonds on the planet.

Chief amongst them is the Hope Diamond, a forty five.52-carat Sort IIb diamond containing traces of boron, which is regarded as a re-cut of the Tavernier Blue or French Blue that when graced the crown of Louis XIV. Stolen in the course of the French Revolution, it will definitely discovered its method to Washington D.C., the place it’s now on show on the Smithsonian.

Well-known Sort IIa Golconda diamonds, in the meantime, embrace the Koh-i-Noor or ‘Mountain of Mild’, a 105.6-carat, Sort IIa stone now within the British Crown Jewels, and the 182-carat Darya-i-Noor or ‘Sea of Mild’ within the Iranian Crown Jewels.

Others have been auctioned at Christie’s. On 19 June 2019, the so-called ‘Mirror of Paradise’, a 52.58-carat, rectangular-cut diamond set in a platinum ring, offered for US$6,517,500 in New York.

In the identical sale, the Arcot II, a stupendous pear-cut diamond that was initially gifted to Queen Charlotte, the spouse of British King George III, by the Nawab of Arcot, within the 18th century, fetched US$3,375,000.

All of which make the choices within the upcoming sale very thrilling certainly. ‘The tones and saturation of those sapphires are virtually unprecedented, embodying a mesmerising velvety high quality coveted by gem collectors,’ notes Vickie Sek, Chairman of Jewelry for Christie’s Asia. ‘It is extraordinarily uncommon to see Golconda diamonds available on the market and every one is exclusive, displaying old-mine slicing, slightly than the uniformity of machine-cut diamonds. Golconda diamonds have been usually utilized in essential Indian and western royal jewels.’

Kashmir sapphires and Golconda diamonds available on the market

Gems-quality sapphires are extraordinarily uncommon. And because the Kashmir mines are solely identified to have produced sapphires for a really brief period of time — simply seven years within the case of the preliminary mine — there are only a few available on the market. 

The identical goes for the colourless Sort IIa Golconda diamonds — essentially the most magnificent diamonds on the planet. 

‘Each Kashmir sapphires and Golconda diamonds are just about non-existent available on the market as there may be hardly any manufacturing from both mine,’ says Sek. ‘The rarity of each gems surrounds them with an virtually legendary attract, attracting collectors from throughout the globe.’