6
Spinel
The Gem of the Mughals
Wine is molten spinels and the decanter is the mine.
—Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, eleventh century
When I had last visited the Tower of London, it was surrounded by a sea of deep-red handmade poppies, one for each of the British or Colonial soldiers who lost his life in the First World War. My great-grandfather had been one of them, and his name was read out in the roll call. I was now back again, several years on, and this time the gray fortress was twinkling in the low yellow light. It was just before Christmas, and I was in search of something very special: one of the most magnificent yet misunderstood gems in the world, the Black Prince’s Ruby.
Set full frontal on the Imperial State Crown of the British monarchy, above a piece of the largest diamond ever mined and below a sapphire thought to have been worn by the last Anglo-Saxon king, this gigantic gemstone hides in plain sight. As the second-largest stone of the thousands that decorate the world’s most famous headpiece, the Black Prince’s Ruby is hardly lacking in stature. Its deep, saturated red beams out of the most recognizable royal images, including Cecil Beaton’s coronation portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, where she sits crowned in Westminster Abbey, the sovereign’s scepter in her right hand and orb resting in her left. Yet despite this prominence it is not especially well recognized, and even less well understood. Few could tell you what it is called and even fewer what it actually is. Absolutely no one can tell you with total confidence how it got there.
While the diamond below it glitters with its cushion-cut brilliance, this stone has no facets. Polished down from the original rough, its uneven, indented surface and lopsided form contrasts with the careful geometry of the crown’s other jewels. Its huge, 170-carat size and rich purplish-red color call to mind a squashed plum or a massive jellied candy. It is a majestic gem, but seemingly out of place, as exotic and surprising as a peacock in an English country garden. In context it can appear almost random, as if added on by mistake or as an afterthought.
This is just one of many misapprehensions it is possible to have about the Black Prince’s Ruby, a gemstone surrounded by almost as many myths and layers of confusion as it has carats. Despite its rough-and-ready appearance, it has been a venerable mainstay of the Crown Jewels, present for much longer than the exquisitely fashioned Cullinan Diamond below it. It dates back at least to the Crown of State worn by King Charles II at his coronation in 1661, and possibly some time before that. Its name has stuck despite the fact that it almost certainly had nothing to do with the Black Prince, the eldest son of King Edward III, and is definitely not a ruby. And to confuse things even further, the stone that is named “ruby” while not actually being one does, bizarrely, contain a real ruby. Noticeably pinker, this small stone within a stone is set in a thick gold collet, filling a drill hole originally made for the mother gem to be strung and worn on a necklace, headpiece, or armband.
This hodgepodge of high quality, bad branding, and problematic provenance makes the Black Prince’s Ruby a fitting symbol of the gem family it actually belongs to—spinel. A much misunderstood, often misrepresented gem type, spinel has nevertheless played a starring role in the royal treasuries of India, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Britain, and France since the Middle Ages. For centuries the spinel enjoyed a distinct status as a jewel of the highest rank, at points being esteemed above even ruby and diamond.
Yet despite the spinel’s rich heritage as a cultural icon, it has not in its later life enjoyed a reputation to match. Today, the most famous spinels are not even known by their own name, but carry that of another gemstone: the 398-carat whopper atop the Great Imperial Crown of Russia is called Catherine the Great’s Ruby, and the huge cabochon that adorned the Peacock Throne of the Mughal emperors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is labeled the Timur Ruby.
These misnomers are indicative of how uncertainty came to settle over a gemstone that had been prized by the world’s most powerful, but latterly came to be considered as somehow an impostor, pretending to be something it was not. All gemstones have to some degree seen their fortunes fluctuate and their reputations rise and fall through history—driven by a combination of fashion, supply and demand, and the emergence of competitor stones. But none has endured so dramatic or unfortunate a journey as spinel, which went from being the toast of Mughal and Persian emperors to a gemstone that lost not only its luster but its very identity, subsumed by the increasingly popular and prevalent ruby—whether being mistaken for it or regarded as its poorer cousin.
For the medieval Arab lapidaries who first wrote about the spinel, there was no mix-up between the two red stones: la’al (spinel) and yaqut (the catch-all term for ruby and sapphire).[1] They had unconsciously anticipated later discoveries showing that the two minerals are distinct both chemically—spinel as magnesium aluminum oxide (MgAl2O4) to ruby’s simpler aluminum oxide (Al2O3)—and in their crystallography, with spinel’s cubic structure having more in common with the diamond than ruby. Its octahedral shape, culminating in two pyramidal points, is the most obvious explanation for why it was dubbed spinelle (Latin spina, “thorn”).
Spinel was the most beloved gem of the Persians and Mughals, rightly prized for its attractive color, high clarity, and abundant carat weight. Huge, polished beads did not need to be cut, and offered an extensive surface area to be engraved with the names of emperors and their ancestors, a family tree cut in crystal as a perpetual record of dynastic power. In its sixteenth- and seventeenth-century heyday, spinel was a gem at the heart of the Renaissance in the East, paraded and prized by royalty at courts famed for their lavish culture, architecture, and embrace of the arts.
By the late nineteenth century, as rubies began to emerge commercially from Burma and steal the show, spinel had become relegated to second-class status, regarded at best as an inferior red stone and at worst as something akin to a fake. European collectors either failed to recognize or declined to appreciate the distinguishing qualities of the spinel that had so engaged its Eastern admirers, who esteemed it as both distinct from and superior to its fellow red gem. For the Mughals and Persians, spinel had been the gemstone of royalty for good reason: a rich red tinged with pink and purple that was a favored metaphor of Iranian court poets, and a stone big and tough enough to engrave with dynastic claims. The truly showstopping examples, like the Black Prince’s Ruby, remained royal gemstones. But more broadly, what had been highly prized la’al in the East increasingly became underrated “spinel ruby” or “balas ruby” in the West. A stone once ranked above diamonds came to be regarded as little better than a second-rate ruby. Spinel truly is a gem that has lived a double life.
In the course of that haphazard journey, spinel has tended to attract stories wild and wonderful even by gemstone standards. Confusion and misattribution have stalked not only the spinel family as a whole but many of its most famous examples. None more so than the Black Prince’s Ruby, a gem whose history is as wonky as its appearance, full of tenuous associations but light on verifiable evidence.[2] The narrative attached to it begins in the fourteenth century, with gifts given by Peter I of Castile to the Black Prince, in recognition of English military support in his long-running succession struggle—a proxy conflict that helped to reignite the Hundred Years’ War between England and France. The elusive jewel crops up again in the fifteenth century, during the reign of Henry V, with an almost certainly mythical description of a “ruby” mounted on the crown he wore over his helmet at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, the stone said to have stayed resolutely in place, and even saved the king’s life, when part of the crown was hacked away by an axe. More credible is the record that part of a crown featuring a large red stone was pawned the same year (prior to Agincourt) to help cover the costs of the campaign. References become more concrete in the sixteenth century. Henry VIII’s crown featured a prominent red gem described as broken, matching the naturally flattened form of the back of the Black Prince’s Ruby.[3] The “Ditchley Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I, dating to around 1592, shows her wearing a headpiece topped with a red gem that appears to contain a drill hole similar to the current stone’s. We can be reasonably confident that the “Wonderful large Ruby, set in the middle of one of the four Crosses” on the crown of Charles II is the gem we know today. That is reinforced by the first piece of convincing visual evidence: a 1718 painting of George I’s Crown of State, whose centerpiece gemstone is recognizably the wobbly pear now set in the Imperial State Crown.
It is clear enough that the Royal Family have been using crowns adorned with large red gemstones since at least the fifteenth century, but there is no certainty at all that these were one and the same jewel. The Black Prince’s Ruby may have been the grosse escarboucle (large carbuncle) that decorated an ornate table given by Peter I of Castile to Prince Edward in the 1360s. It might have been the spinel offered for sale to Henry V in 1414, when he was designing a crown for his marriage to Catherine of Valois. It could have been the “large and very precious” red stone presented to Catherine of Aragon a century later, or the “large Orientall ruby” bought by Charles II prior to his coronation in April 1661. We will probably never know for sure.
Given all this uncertainty, it is fitting that the Black Prince’s Ruby earned its name in a case of double mistaken identity, in part perpetrated by the eighteenth-century Whig MP and historian Horace Walpole. Shown a painting of a man labeled as the Black Prince—but whose identity was widely disputed at the time, as it has been since—Walpole took particular interest in the headgear: “He has a hat with a white feather, and a large ruby, exactly in the shape of the rough ruby still in the crown,” Walpole wrote. Although neither his identification of the man in the portrait, nor the gemstone on his hat, appears to have been sound, the idea caught on and the “Black Prince’s Ruby” was born.[4]
This is just one example of how famous spinels have come to be saddled with incorrect associations. By contrast, the gemstone’s role through history has been reasonably clear—the combination of size and color making it fit for Crown Jewels and the most powerful of patrons. Comb through the treasuries of history’s richest dynasties, and the red stones of note are invariably spinels. Only comparatively recently did the spinel start to be confused with and pejoratively compared to the ruby, earning its disobliging moniker as the “Great Pretender.” But the real story here is of the Great Misnomer: a gem that has variously suffered for being misnamed, misidentified, and misunderstood. Strip away the mistaken identity, and the radiant glory of this rich red gemstone starts to emerge once more.
Spinel’s latter-day reputation as the ruby’s poor relation would have come as a surprise to the collectors of prior eras. Early documentary evidence makes clear that this was regarded as a very precious gemstone indeed. “There is but one special mountain that produces them,” wrote the traveler and merchant Marco Polo (1254–1324). “The stones are dug on the king’s account, and no one else dares dig in that mountain on pain of forfeiture of life as well as goods; nor may any one carry the stones out of the kingdom.”[5] The closely regulated gem to which he referred was la’al-e Badakshī—literally “something red [Arabic la’al] from Badakhshan.” La’al (lāl in Persian) was the name given to the very particular shades of red that are characteristic of spinel—the best stones being a deep red, but others appearing in softer pinks or purples.[*1] Badakhshan was the historic region encompassing parts of modern Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and home to the mines of Kuh-i-Lal, one of the most significant producers of large red and pink spinel in the world.[*2] Sometimes written as “Balakhshan,” this was the source of the later European tendency to label spinel as “balas ruby,” the beginning of the slippery slope that would lead to much later misattribution.
The discovery of spinels in Badakhshan is thought to have followed a major earthquake at some point in the seventh century. “It is said that the mine was located when there was an earthquake in the area and the mountain was cloven,” the Persian scholar al-Biruni recorded. “Big rocks fell down and everything was destroyed. La’al were disgorged in the process.” Initially, he suggests, local women tried to grind down these purplish-red stones as a form of dye.[*3] When they were found to be useless for this purpose, they “showed the rubies to men and the matter was publicized.”[6] Marco Polo was just one of many who later picked up the threads of this story: the earthquake that had brought these sparkling stones to life, the local women who had turned their noses up at them, and the royal monopoly that had quickly developed around mining them. Badakhshan would be the source of all the famous, historic, and massive spinels we know today, “sparkling pink gems of the size of eggs,” as one nineteenth-century source described them.[7] As such accounts suggest, size was critical to the appeal of la’al. No other source of spinels has ever produced crystals to rival these mauve monsters. The egg-sized gems that had been cast aside by Badakhshani washerwomen would go on to decorate the crowns of the world’s most powerful dynasties, making Kuh-i-Lal and its neighbors one of those astonishing gem deposits that has defined the success and history of a gemstone.
Of all the spinel’s fans in high places, none were more enthusiastic than the Mughal emperors who ruled large swaths of the Asian subcontinent at the height of their power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Mughal Empire was a cultural and artistic as well as political powerhouse: its patronage of artists, architects, and craftsmen was legendary, and the modern image of India largely remains its creation: from the Taj Mahal to Delhi’s Red Fort and the Buland Darwaza (Victory Gate) at the dynastic capital of Fatehpur Sikri. The Mughal penchant for lavish art, vast architecture, and showpiece jewelry was not simply the expression of wealth and power. It also represented the projection of identity. As Mongol-Turkish outsiders to what they called Hindustan, the Mughals strove to establish legitimacy by emphasizing their connection to a previous ruling dynasty: the Timurids, whose empire spanning Turkey and Central Asia had extended into modern Pakistan and northern India. Timur, also known as Tamerlane (1336–1405), a descendant of Genghis Khan, had captured and sacked Delhi in 1398. His great-great-great-grandson, Babur, who had inherited a tiny piece of the fragmented Timurid Empire, would repeat this feat in 1526 and become the first Mughal emperor, reigning until his death in 1530. Babur, a warlord who wrote poetry almost as freely as he drank wine, and who seems to have enjoyed designing palaces as much as planning invasions, created the template for a ruling dynasty of aesthetes.[8]
Babur’s successors amplified his taste for the extravagant as much as they expanded his physical empire. As the decades passed, Mughal emperors became renowned as the world’s most lavish jewelry collectors, with extravagantly sized spinels at the forefront. The fourth emperor, Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), was described by the English priest Reverend Edward Terry as the “greatest and richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth,” and by the Flemish diamond merchant Jacques de Coutre as “looking like an idol on account of the quantities of jewels he wore, with many precious stones around his neck as well as spinels, emeralds and pearls on his arms, and diamonds hanging from his turban.”[9] While many gemstones were embraced at the Mughal court, spinel held a special status. A catalogue describing the court of Jahangir’s father, the long-reigning Akbar the Great (r. 1556–1605), described how one of his treasury’s twelve sections was reserved for gemstones, and that these were split into three groups: the first for spinel, the second for ruby, sapphire, diamond, and emerald, and the third for pearl.[10] According to the Mughal expert Susan Stronge, “all precious stones were eagerly sought, but spinels had a superior position and were kept separately.”[11]
In addition to its size and striking color, the basis of spinel’s preeminence can be explained by the importance of Persian tradition in Mughal society. Persian polymaths did not just sprinkle spinel into their poetry as a piece of imagery. They also approached it scientifically, the scholar al-Biruni describing la’al as “a red gem, translucid, limpid, which resembles a superlative ruby in color. It often surpasses it for its beauty and glamour but it differs from it in hardness.” These characteristics made spinels a regular adornment to the turbans and crowns of Persian rulers, where they often sat alongside rubies (the distinction underlining how early Eastern connoisseurs of la’al had no trouble telling the two red gems apart). As the art historian Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani has explained: “spinels…appear to have shone with a unique brilliance in Iranian culture and later in Hindustan where Persian prevailed as the language of literature and social intercourse.” He has shown how the spinel features as a consistent metaphor in Persian poetry dating to the tenth century, with wine often being described as “molten spinels,” and “[the] ascent of the sun in the sky…likened to a spinel coming out of its mine.”[12]
The associations with sun, fire, blood, and wine are familiar ones for red stones, and in different contexts have also been attached to both ruby and garnet. Yet in Mughal India, where Persian was the court language and “courtly culture…drew on the rich and highly developed literary and scientific traditions of Iran,” spinel was esteemed as first among equals.[13] Practical considerations also helped to elevate it. Its sheer size made it appropriate for the tradition of gemstone carving that was popular in Iranian and Mughal royal circles. The beads would be drilled with diamond-tipped points so they could be strung into necklaces and headdresses or strapped onto armbands, and they had the names of their past and present owners carved into them, along with notable dates and sometimes longer inscriptions.
Several spectacular examples have survived, in some cases assembled by later jewelers. One such necklace, featuring eleven spinel cabochons, sold at auction in 2011 for close to $5 million. Three of the stones are engraved, two with Jahangir’s name, and a third also with his two successors: Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658) and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). All three names also feature on a 133-carat spinel bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1922 by Lady Carew.[*4] With succession a continually contested issue for the Mughals, stones like these would have been valuable symbols used by emperors to assert their authority and legitimacy.[*5] Their engraving was a way of validating the hereditary record on something considered immutable and eternal: hard, huge, and historic precious gems.
Shah Jahan’s life would end in ignominy, usurped and imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb, but at the height of his power he had been the archetypal Mughal ruler, responsible for some of the empire’s most lasting icons. He consciously presented himself as a Timurid—choosing to wear a full beard as the dynasty’s most famous ancestor had done, unlike his father or grandfather, and adopting a title that had also been attached to Timur, styling himself as the second “Lord of the Conjunction.”[*6] [14] He was also a builder on a scale grand even by Mughal standards: the architect of both the Taj Mahal, tomb for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal, and the Peacock Throne, a beyond blinged-up stately seat that cost twice as much as the Taj and took seven years to complete.
Sitting on top of the Peacock Throne were two gemstones that would become enduring symbols of power and conquest in the centuries that followed, as Iranian, Sikh, and finally British forces took possession of the supreme Mughal treasures. One was the Koh-i-Noor Diamond. The second, an engraved spinel, was the stone that became known as the Timur Ruby. Like the Black Prince’s Ruby, this spinel is now in the British Royal Collection. And like that stone it carries a double misnomer, for this cabochon is neither a ruby nor was it ever owned by Timur. It is another example of spinel’s deliciously twisted history, and the layers of confusion that have built up around these enormous stones. As is so often the case with spinel, a large gemstone has given rise to a series of even taller stories.
Weighing 352.5 carats and shaped like a slightly squashed human heart, the Timur Ruby is engraved with the names of five Mughal emperors, along with that of Nader Shah, the Persian prince who had taken the gem—along with the Peacock Throne in its entirety—when he sacked Delhi in 1739. The British seized it from its Sikh owners after their annexation of Punjab in 1849, along with treasures including the Koh-i-Noor. In her journal, Queen Victoria recorded her admiration for the gem: “The rubies [sic] are even more wonderful [than the pearls and emeralds]. They are cabochons, unset but pierced. The one is the largest in the world, therefore even more remarkable than the Koh-i-noor!”[*7] [15] This special “ruby” was then mounted into a diamond necklace with three smaller spinels by Garrard in 1853.
Confusion crept in more than half a century later, when Sir James Dunlop Smith, then private secretary to the viceroy of India, was deputed to source the provenance of several Crown Jewels of Indian origin, in response to a request from Queen Mary, the wife of George V. Susan Stronge, who has studied the Timur Ruby in detail and done more than anyone to sort truth from abundant myth, has shown that Dunlop Smith’s work set off a train of misunderstandings, mistranslations, and misapprehensions that forged one of the great gemstone myths.
Dunlop Smith was given special access to the Timur Ruby, which was removed from its mount so he and a translator could examine the inscriptions. Yet despite this close examination, he appears to have confused it with another spinel he had read about that had belonged to Timur and that was also engraved with the “Lord of the Conjunction” title. Rushing to make the association, he appears to have glossed over inconsistencies in the inscriptions, as well as the fact that this title was adopted by multiple emperors, including not only Timur and Shah Jahan, but also Nader Shah. We now know that it was to the latter that the inscription almost certainly referred, but Dunlop Smith did not. The upshot was yet another misidentification of a famous spinel. Like Horace Walpole before him, Dunlop Smith had looked at a beguiling red stone and found what he wanted to see. Thanks to him, Victoria’s “ruby” would be forevermore known (in every sense incorrectly) as the Timur Ruby.[16]
By this point, it was not only fake history that was starting to bedevil the spinel. The item was losing not just its authentic provenance but its entire identity as a gemstone. By the time the Timur Ruby was being misattributed in the 1910s, spinel had come to be defined in unflattering contrast to the ruby and as a subset of it. A gemstone that had been the most prized of all was increasingly discounted as something of little worth, a poor imitator of the ruby to which it had once been deemed preferable. As is often the case with bad reputations, the spinel’s was too easily earned, and would prove incredibly difficult to shake off.
In 1892 the British jeweler Edwin Streeter was publicizing a new edition of his guide to precious stones, and turned his attention to the subject of fakes. The Otago Daily Times reported him sharing the story of a customer who had brought family heirlooms to him for valuation, only to be told that the blue stones purporting to be sapphires were in fact worthless imitations. “But paste is not the only substitute for real gems,” the report continued. “The spinel and the balas, the one a lively poppy red, the other a violet rose, frequently usurp the dignity of a true ruby…the pure ruby of ten carats is almost beyond valuation, while the other stones, called by the same name, are only of trifling value.”[17] How had a gemstone once admired for its distinctive properties, esteemed and valued above the ruby, become a dirty word in the jewelry trade?
One significant factor was the emergence of the science of gemmology, which subjected gemstones to increasingly detailed scrutiny that allowed for finer distinctions to be made. As the study of gems became more professional, the reputation of the spinel seemed to sink with it. In 1783 the pioneering French crystallographer Jean-Baptiste Louis Romé de l’Isle established the difference in crystal structure between the trigonal ruby and the cubic spinel, using new equipment to measure the angles along different faces precisely. Then in 1812 the German mineralogist Friedrich Mohs published his scale of mineral hardness, confirming that ruby and spinel also differed on this measure: ruby was 9 on the scale, while spinel was at 8. Whereas spinel’s earlier Eastern admirers had esteemed the stone for its core attributes of striking size and carmine color, the early Western gemmologists increasingly highlighted the same gem for all that it was not: those same things that made it different from, but in their eyes lesser than, the ruby.
At the same time as spinel was being distinguished empirically from ruby, it was also being lumped together with it in its nomenclature. Initially, early references to “balas” in the thirteenth century were quite distinct.[18] When variations of the term “spinel” were introduced in the sixteenth century, they referred to stones now coming from Burma, while the “balas” remained what the Persians had dubbed la’al-e Badakshī (the red stone of Badakhshan). But by the nineteenth century, jewelers began to refer not only to “balas rubies” but also “spinel rubies” as varieties of spinel that, Streeter emphasized, should be “readily distinguished from the true or Oriental Ruby, with which it has been sometimes confounded.”[19] The message was clear: ruby was the prince of red stones and spinel the pauper.
In the hands of European gem specialists,[*8] spinel was suffering a dual misfortune: either it was being classified as an inferior ruby or it was actually being mistaken for one. With so many different names and terms floating about, it was only too easy for the material to be misidentified or wrongly described. What had been referred to as “balas ruby” or “spinel ruby” soon simply became ruby. Queen Victoria’s reference to the spinels in her collection as “rubies” suggests how widely this broad brush may have spread. With friends like these, spinel needed no enemies. Rather than being allowed to flourish in its own right—as la’al had done in the hands of its Mughal and Persian admirers—spinel was becoming entirely subsumed within the ruby’s increasingly dominant brand.
Spinel’s reputation was also a victim of circumstance in the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s and 1890s the craze for Burmese rubies was entering full swing: the British annexation of northern Burma in 1885–86 opened up the exploitation of the Mogok mines, backed by investors including the London bank of N. M. Rothschild. Excitement was intense: when their exploration company, Burma Ruby Mines Ltd., was floated on the London Stock Exchange in February 1889, such a large scrum descended in search of shares that Lord Rothschild had to climb up a ladder “in a burglarious fashion” to escape the crowd and get into his office.[20] Although both spinel and ruby are found in the Mogok region (a coincidence that undoubtedly led to even more confusion), these nineteenth-century prospectors were only after one form of red gold, and that was ruby.
The spinels mined in Burma were not a patch on their cousins from Badakhshan: bright red at their best, but far from the same mighty size. Ruby was the prize in Burma, and Mogok became famous as the “Valley of Rubies.” The weight of the jewelry industry swung firmly behind marketing ruby as the red stone of choice, with the strong support of one person in particular. Edwin Streeter was an opportunistic gem dealer and jeweler, an influential figure whose professional opinion was strongly sought after, but he was also one of the key financial backers of Burma Ruby Mines Ltd. When he deprecated the spinel in comparison to the “Oriental” (i.e., Burmese) ruby, he was speaking not just as a respected industry figure but as a major investor in Burma Ruby Mines Ltd., who may have been expressing his commercial interests as much as his professional opinion. It was paramount that ruby prices rocketed, and if that was at the cost of the once-hallowed spinel, so be it.
However they were motivated, these efforts contributed to a clear divergence in both the reputation and the valuation of the two red stones. And it was not just marketing that made the difference. The mineralogical distinction between ruby and spinel only served to make the increasingly sought-after ruby rarer, and therefore more valuable. By contrast, spinel was falling from grace, a reality reflected by tumbling prices. In the 1892 edition of his study, Streeter cited an inventory of the French Crown Jewels from 1791, which valued a 56.75-carat “spinel ruby” at £2,000 and a 20.38-carat “balas ruby” at £400, before cautioning (one assumes again not without bias): “it should be stated that at the present day the stones would not fetch one-tenth of such prices. Today,” Streeter continued, “the Spinels are not much cared for.”[21]
That statement would become even more profound in light of the final loss of face in the spinel story. Just a few years earlier, French chemist Auguste Verneuil had discovered the flame fusion process, a method by which corundum—and soon, spinel—could be chemically and structurally re-created in a furnace. By the 1930s, synthetic spinel had become commercially available, easy and cheap to manufacture and in a range of different colors that were produced to imitate other gems.[*9] [22] It would also become the mainstay of American class or graduation rings, so widely worn in the United States that the word “spinel” would become a byword for “fake” in some circles.[23] It looked like the final nail in the coffin for the once-illustrious spinel.
The damage done by Streeter and synthetics would be long-lasting but not permanent. If the history of gemstones teaches us anything, it is that no stone’s story is ever entirely told, and changes in fortune may lie just around the corner. The field gemmologist and spinel enthusiast Vincent Pardieu has described how a new find was physically dropped into his hand in 2001, when he was working in Myanmar: “stunning little gems with a bright neon pinkish red color, convincing me that spinels could equal rubies in beauty.”[24] These gems were unlike any spinels ever seen before: vivid pink octahedral crystals lacking any of the “dark tone” seen in other examples. On that basis, and with a recent Star Wars film in the back of his mind, Pardieu christened them “Jedi spinels,” a name that rather appealed to the trade. Dosed up with high quantities of chromium, these hot pink pebbles came from Burma’s Namya and Man Sin mines, which I later visited on my own trip to Mogok. I adored these little miracles of nature. Unlike the Badakhshani spinels that were historically found in more rounded forms, the Jedis were perfect, sharp octahedral crystals, which already shone brightly when they were first pulled from the ground. It was not hard to see why the locals had dubbed such octahedra nat thwe—“polished by the spirits.”
Propelled by smarter branding than the spinel had typically enjoyed, these Jedi spinels quickly made a splash on the Asian auction circuit. Then in 2007 another remarkable discovery followed. The unearthing of a 115-pound lump of rough spinel in Mahenge, Tanzania, signaled the discovery of a significant new deposit of bright pink-red gems. The region would subsequently yield not only more red and pink stones but examples of the extremely rare cobalt-blue spinel variety that had begun to be mined in Vietnam in the 1980s.[25] In the early twenty-first century, a stone that had become moribund and unloved started to enjoy a new lease on life. In a delicious irony, its fortunes have also been boosted by the stone that was once its nemesis. The exponential rise of ruby prices has broadened the market for colored gemstones; spinel, with its wider variety of colors and remarkable clarity that requires no heat treatment, has been a clear beneficiary. Ruby’s poor substitute has started to become, in the right context, its viable alternative.
This twist in the tale continues a history of fluctuating fortunes, extreme even by gemstone standards. Other gems have gone from popularity to obscurity, from a plaything of the rich and famous to the toast of the cheap and cheerful. But perhaps none has traveled from such a high as spinel enjoyed at the court of the Mughal emperors to the low it touched at the turn of the twentieth century. Certainly no other gemstone has been saddled with such an unfair reputation as spinel, in the rush by the early gemmologists to distinguish it from ruby, with seemingly no thought to why this alleged impostor had once been regarded as such a precious prize.
The spinel story may be one defined by confusion and misapprehension, but it is also revealing about the forces that variously propel gemstones to prominence and bring them crashing back to the earth from which they came. Like the diamond, spinel shows how gems are products of marketing as much as mineralogy. In the century when diamond was the beneficiary of one of history’s greatest advertising campaigns, spinel was suffering because its brand had become hollowed out, shorn of its former association with royal magnificence and fatally typecast as a symbol of fraud. And like every other gem, but perhaps to an even greater extent, spinel reveals how these stones are objects shaped by human aspiration. The most famous spinels have been stones onto which emperors have carved their names, with which rulers have sought to assert their legitimacy, and around which historians have woven often fanciful narratives. They are not just historical objects, but ones that have been used to shape and sometimes distort history.
While being used to tell the stories of their owners, the narratives of these stones have frequently become lost and confused in the process. Yet through that confusion, the fundamental truth of the spinel shines through—these are gems too big, too red, too eye-catching to miss. Like moths to a flame, the powerful have made use of them and the curious tried to make sense of them. The spinel may have been known by many names throughout its history and endured a roller-coaster ride of reputation, but its essential qualities have never really been extinguished. As several of the most famous crowns ever worn attest, when it comes to making a statement in stone, spinel is simply a gem like no other.