Famous stones & historic jewels

India was the world’s only significant diamond source for most of recorded history. GIA groups the historic workings into three: a southern group in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, the most productive, which Europeans called Golconda after the fortress city that traded the stones; an eastern group in Odisha, including the Sambalpur mines on the Mahanadi; and a northern group centered on the Panna district of Madhya Pradesh. The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited four of them in the 1660s: Ramallakota, Kollur, Soumelpour in Bengal, and a working on the Kistna, now the Krishna.

Tying a named diamond to a named pit is harder than the popular accounts suggest, and GIA’s own historical bibliography treats the identification of old mine references as an unsolved research problem. The Louvre states only that the Regent was found in 1698 in the mines of Golconda; the rough weighed 426 ct, and Philippe d’Orléans bought the cut stone, now 140.64 ct, on 6 June 1717. Historic Royal Palaces says the East India Company took the 105.6 ct Koh-i-Noor from the deposed Maharaja Duleep Singh in 1849, that it was re-cut in 1852, and that it was set in the 1937 crown of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.

The 45.52 ct Hope Diamond is a Type IIb diamond, one colored blue by boron, and GIA grades it Fancy Deep grayish blue, VS1. The Smithsonian, which has held it since Harry Winston gave it in 1958, is careful about the rest. Louis XIV bought a blue stone of about 115 ct from Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1668, but the museum notes that the evidence for source and timing is circumstantial and that Tavernier never recorded the purchase. The re-cut French Blue of about 69 ct vanished in the September 1792 looting of the Garde-Meuble, and when a 45.52 ct blue diamond was described in London in 1812 the writer drew no connection between them. Nobody proposed one until 1858. On the curse, the museum is blunt: the stories came from newspapers and from Pierre Cartier’s sales patter.

The 41 ct Dresden Green reached Saxony from India and entered the Grünes Gewölbe in 1742. Set in a hat ornament since 1769, it was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 25 November 2019 to 1 March 2020, which is why it was not in the case robbed that November. GIA compared the Hope with the Wittelsbach-Graff, a Fancy Deep blue stone that Graff re-cut from 35.56 to 31.06 ct after buying it in 2008, and concluded that the two were not cut from one crystal.

The Cullinan came out of a mine near Pretoria in 1905 and weighed 3,106 metric carats. The Royal Collection records that the Asschers of Amsterdam cut it into nine large stones, 97 small brilliants and some unpolished fragments, with three men working 14-hour days for eight months. Cullinan I, 530.2 ct, sits in the Sovereign’s Sceptre with Cross; Cullinan II, 317.4 ct, in the front band of the Imperial State Crown. Petra Diamonds, which owns the mine, dates its discovery to 1902.

Botswana supplies most of the modern giants. Lucara’s Karowe mine has recovered ten diamonds over 1,000 ct, among them the 2,488 ct Motswedi in 2024, the 1,758 ct Sewelô in 2019 and the 1,109 ct Lesedi La Rona in 2015. Lucara sold the Lesedi La Rona to Graff for US$53 million in September 2017, about US$47,777 per carat. Debswana recovered a 1,098 ct stone at Jwaneng in 2021, the largest gem-quality diamond in its history. In Lesotho, Gem Diamonds took the 910 ct Lesotho Legend from Letšeng in 2018, a D-color Type IIa rough that sold for US$40 million and which the company calls the fifth largest gem-quality diamond ever found.

The Star of India, a Sri Lankan star sapphire of just over 563 carats, is the largest gem-quality star sapphire known. Its six-rayed star, or asterism, comes from light reflecting off needles of rutile, which the American Museum of Natural History describes as a flaw rather than a virtue. On 29 October 1964 Jack Murphy and two accomplices took it from the museum’s old Morgan Memorial Hall along with the DeLong Star Ruby, the Midnight Star, the Schettler Emerald and nearly all the diamonds. Arrests came quickly and most of the notable stones returned. The DeLong Star Ruby had to be ransomed. About a dozen stones never came back, and they included every diamond.

The Smithsonian’s National Gem Collection holds two of the other best-known colored stones. The Logan Sapphire from Sri Lanka, 423 ct in a gold and platinum mount with twenty diamonds, was the gift of Mrs. John A. Logan in 1960 and is the heaviest mounted gem in the collection. The 138.7 ct Rosser Reeves Star Ruby, also Sri Lankan, came from Mr. and Mrs. Rosser Reeves in 1965; the museum’s own text calls it perhaps the largest and finest star ruby in the world. Qatar Museums holds a carved Mughal emerald of 217.8 ct, produced in India and dated on the stone to 1107 AH, or 1695 to 1696.

Before gemologists could measure a stone’s optical properties, red gems of similar color went into one category. Several of the most famous historic “rubies” are spinel, a magnesium aluminum oxide, while ruby is red corundum, an aluminum oxide. Older European inventories called red spinel balas ruby.

Historic Royal Palaces is direct about the Black Prince’s Ruby, the large red stone in the cross at the front of the Imperial State Crown: it is not a ruby but, in the palace’s words, a balas or spinel. The rest of its story is tradition. Pedro of Castile is said to have given it to Edward the Black Prince in 1367, and Henry V is alleged to have worn it at Agincourt in 1415. The palace publishes no weight for it, and neither does this chapter.

Russia’s Great Imperial Crown, made for Catherine II’s coronation in 1762 by Georg Friedrich Eckart and Jérémie Pauzié, carries 4,936 diamonds and is topped by a spinel of 398.72 ct. The Kiani Crown in Tehran is set with a spinel associated with Aurangzeb. The Timur Ruby, a larger inscribed spinel in the Royal Collection, is usually given as 352.5 ct, a figure that comes from published accounts rather than from a catalogue entry.

La Peregrina is a large natural pear-shaped pearl. GIA notes that it survives in fine condition, which is unusual for a pearl of its age, and that is close to the limit of what an institution will state about it. The rest of the story, that Spanish queens wore it, that Joseph Bonaparte carried it out of Spain in 1813, that it passed to the Hamilton family, comes from popular retellings rather than from a holding institution, and the pearl is now in a private collection. Pearls are weighed in grains, four to the carat, and the grain figures quoted for La Peregrina come from the same retellings.

The Olympic Australis is the opposite case, because its owner publishes what it knows. Altmann and Cherny record a mass of precious opal of 17,000 carats, mined at the Eight Mile opal field near Coober Pedy, South Australia, in 1956. John Altmann and Rudi Cherny bought it and named it for the Olympic Games held in Melbourne that year. It is on permanent display at their showroom in Pitt Street, Sydney. The firm estimates that, cut into one-carat stones, the material would be worth about US$1.8 million.

Historic Royal Palaces counts more than 100 objects and over 23,000 gemstones in the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London. Iran’s national jewels sit in the Treasury of the Central Bank in Tehran, which describes the Darya-i-Noor as the largest pink diamond in the world at about 182 ct, set in a frame of 457 diamonds and four rubies, and a Pahlavi crown of 3,380 diamonds and 368 pearls weighing 2,080 g. Russia’s Diamond Fund holds the Great Imperial Crown, made for Catherine II in 1762 with 4,936 diamonds totaling 2,858 ct, 75 Indian pearls and a 398.72 ct spinel. The Treasury of the Munich Residenz holds the regalia of the Kingdom of Bavaria, whose crown Martin-Guillaume Biennais made in Paris in 1806. Portugal’s Museu do Tesouro Real opened in the west wing of the Ajuda National Palace on 1 June 2022 with more than a thousand pieces.

On 19 October 2025 thieves took eight pieces from the Louvre’s Galerie d’Apollon, among them the sapphire parure of Queens Marie-Amélie and Hortense and the emerald necklace of Empress Marie-Louise. They dropped the crown of Empress Eugénie, which was crushed and lost about a dozen of its 1,354 diamonds. As of February 2026 none of the eight had been recovered. The gallery reopened on 22 July 2026 with its precious objects removed.

The House of Fabergé made imperial Easter eggs for the Russian court. The Royal Collection puts the total at about fifty and holds the Basket of Flowers egg of 1901, which Nicholas II gave to Alexandra Feodorovna and which cost 6,850 roubles. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts holds the Peter the Great egg of 1903, made in Mikhail Perkhin’s workshop with miniatures by Vasilii Zuiev, under the 1947 bequest of Lillian Thomas Pratt. Institutions do not agree on how many imperial eggs were made or survive, so this chapter names individual eggs instead of quoting a total.

Golconda is a trade name, not a mine. GIA applies it to a producing region of roughly 210 by 95 miles in southern India, named after the fortress city through which the stones were sold. Golconda diamonds tend to be Type IIa, carrying no measurable nitrogen or boron, a group GIA puts at about 2% of all diamonds. GIA assigns the Hope, the Koh-i-Noor, the Idol’s Eye, the Dresden Green and the Wittelsbach-Graff to the region, but with wording such as “believed to have originated” rather than a mine record. Golconda names a marketing category and a general source area, not a documented pit.