To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (13074 ) 10/4/1998 3:41:00 PM From: Gauguin Respond to
Alex, Orange Pearls: Speaking of the wonders of our little friends in nature, did you see the article in the July 97 Smithsonian about the rare orange pearls of Vietnam? Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. These rare pearls come not from oysters but from the Melo melo, a large snail, or gastropod, with an orange shell. They may have belonged to the last emperor of Vietnam, Bao Dai, who ascended to the throne in 1932..... ....he [Swiss gems dealer "with something very interesting"] just very languidly opened up this box. Inside, there were twenty three pearls. And because they were so large, and because they were such an intense color, I said to myself, 'This can't be happening; they can't be genuine.' The pearls were a brilliant orange color, and the largest among them was 32 millimeters - bigger than a robin's egg. Zucker had never seen an orange pearl of any kind..... .....took one look at the pearls and said, 'They're from Vietnam' He had seen one such pearl several years a go and had traced it to a shell found in Vietnamese waters. Scarratt reported that only four orange pearls had ever been recorded, all in the past thirty years. He was absolutely staggered to see a collection of 23 such pearls, in magnificent condition.
