Opinion - One of the biggest diamonds ever was just discovered, but the romance is long gone

A massive white diamond was found recently in Botswana. Weighing over a pound, it is the largest diamond discovered in more than a century, and the second-largest ever found. It has made headlines around the world, as when major diamonds have been discovered before.

But there’s a way in which such discoveries have lost their magic. This recent find will no doubt be cut into several carefully shaped stones, and handed off to some corporate headquarters or end up in a collector’s vault. It is unlikely to make a world tour, attracting crowds of viewers.

There are famous and storied diamonds, those with lore and romance attached. The Koh-i-Noor, at 105.6 carats, is part of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. Its origins and discovery are unclear, but it was part of the jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne, made for the Mughal Emperor in 1635. When Nader Shah of Persia invaded northern India in 1739, his forces sacked the city of Delhi and carried off the Peacock Throne as part of the plunder.

The stone was later passed to Ahmad Shah Durrani, founder of the Afghan Empire; passed to Sikh ruler Ranjit Singh (monarchs gave each other jewels as thanks for various favors back then); and, eventually, in 1849, given to Queen Victoria when the East India Company annexed the Punjab. Another of the stones captured along with the Peacock throne was the world’s largest pink diamond, the Daria-i-Noor — now owned by the Iranian government.

The Hope Diamond, perhaps the world’s most famous, is at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. But it had a pretty spectacular adventure before finally landing in a case in Washington. Purchased in India by a French trader in the 1600s, it was recut and sold to French King Louis IV. Stolen during the French Revolution, it was recut and reappeared 50 years later in the collection of London banking heir Henry Hope. It was displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

It is a beautiful deep blue, over an inch across, and apparently fluoresces. It passed through the hands of generations of Hope heirs, ended up being bought by Cartier, who sold it to socialite and mining heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean. Across the centuries, it attracted the mythology of a curse, that its owners would face bad fortune. Harry Winston bought it in 1949 and exhibited it around the world. In 1958, he donated it to the Smithsonian, sending it to the museum through the postal service.

The Hope Diamond is truly exceptional. But thanks to modern mining and X-ray technology, more big diamonds are being found. There are some huge finds just from recent decades. Karowe Mine in Botswana (the source of this week’s discovery) has produced four other diamonds of more than 1,000 carats in the last 10 years.

Yet these don’t capture the imagination. They don’t have names.

Even the discoveries of recent decades that are named suffer from lack of creativity. A South African stone found in 2002 is apparently the size of a golf ball. The largest white diamond ever auctioned, it was sold by Christies in 2022 to an anonymous buyer for $33 million. The name of this stone? “The Rock.”

The even-more-tediously named 342-carat “26th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (really) was discovered in 1980. It is still in the Russian government collection. It might be a beautiful gem, but that’s hardly a narrative to inspire the imagination.

But in a sense, we aren’t so interested because diamonds matter less. For those who want things that sparkle, there are plenty of choices. We’ve had the cubic zirconia since the 1970s, and Swarovski promised to offer “a diamond for everyone” with their crystals, long before they got into actually making lab-created diamonds.

Thanks to lab diamonds, real gems are now relatively affordable; fake sparkle is insanely cheap. At any fast fashion store, I can find garments strewn with plastic rhinestones, a level of bling that would have awed a medieval peasant. If I want to, I can even have diamanté fingernails.

We are no longer limited to what the earth surrenders to us, of gems created through geological processes, to be carefully cut by jewelers, creating facets to reflect the light.

Diamonds may be forever; our interest is not.

Katrina Gulliver is a historian and freelance writer. She writes the Substack “Notes from the Field.”

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