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Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires

Bejewelled: Sri Lanka’s Greatest Sapphires

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 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 task of upgrading the crown 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 accelerate 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 symbolizes 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 back dated at least another 700 years. Twenty five percent of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, less fruitfully, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks (90% are between 500 to 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to often just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and stream. Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits of 5 to 500 feet in depth 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. By these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuing of gem-mining licenses and the leasing government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exporting and made it mandatory that gems discovered within mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a share of sales amounting to 2.5%. 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 stones to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arabians traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers who often resell the stones back to other consumers or 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 percent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires. Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, most contrarily, are also red, purple; pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety being dependant on the stone’s chemical composition. Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires, a yellow sapphire that 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 ...
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