Famous Diamonds

A few diamonds have outlived every hand that held them. Passed between dynasties, looted in wars, hidden through revolutions and finally settled behind museum glass, they carry the chronicle of Europe written in a single crystal. What follows is a portrait of the most storied of them.

The Cullinan

No larger rough of gem quality has ever come out of the ground. At 3,106.75 carats, the Cullinan was lifted from the wall of the Premier mine on 26 January 1905 by the surface manager Frederick Wells, and took its name from the mine’s proprietor, Sir Thomas Cullinan. The Transvaal authorities purchased the crystal and made a gift of it to King Edward VII, who in turn placed it in the care of the Asscher Brothers in Amsterdam. The cutters spent months simply contemplating it before committing to the cleave. Legend has the first stroke snapping the steel blade while the diamond stood firm; the stone gave way only at the second attempt.

The division produced nine principal gems and ninety-six lesser ones. The two finest were reserved for the Crown. Cullinan I, a pear brilliant of 530.20 carats known as the Star of Africa, crowns the Sovereign’s Sceptre kept in the Tower of London; Cullinan II, a cushion of 317.40 carats, sits at the front of the Imperial State Crown. A further tier of stones — the 94.40-carat Cullinan III, the 63.60-carat Cullinan IV and the 18.80-carat Cullinan V among them — came to Queen Mary in 1910, who had them mounted in brooches and worked into the circlet of her crown.

The Blue Hope

Few stones have gathered more legend than the Hope. One persistent story has it torn from an idol of the goddess Sita, whose curse was said to follow the thief and every owner after him. Where it truly came from is uncertain; the likeliest account is a purchase by Tavernier in 1653 at the Kollur workings. His own drawings record a roughly triangular stone of about 115 carats — the Tavernier Blue.

The crystal entered the French crown when Tavernier sold it to Louis XIV in 1678. The King had it recut to 67.125 carats, christened it the French Blue, and wore it as a cravat ornament; under Louis XV it was reset into an insignia for the Order of the Golden Fleece. The September 1792 raid on the royal store-house swallowed it from sight for nearly half a century. It surfaced again in 1839 among the gems of Henry Philip Hope — by then the Blue Hope — changed hands repeatedly thereafter, and ended its travels when Harry Winston, having owned it for a time, made a gift of it to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains.

The Dresden Green

Alone among the great diamonds for the natural apple-green of its body, the Dresden Green made its first appearance in a London newspaper of 1722:

On Tuesday last, in the afternoon, one Mr. Marcus Moses, lately arrived from India, had the honor to wait on his Majesty with his large diamond, which is of a fine emerald green colour. It is said there never was seen the like in Europe before, being free from any defect in the world. — The Post Boy, London, 25—27 October 1722

It was at the Leipzig Fair of 1741 that Frederick Augustus II of Saxony acquired it from a Dutch dealer, and from his capital the stone takes its name, that city having sheltered it for upward of two centuries. The jeweller Diessbach mounted it in 1768 within a hat clasp, flanked by a pair of larger white brilliants — the arrangement in which it survives today, on view in the Green Vault of Dresden Castle.

The Orlov

Kept among the treasures of the Diamond Fund in the Moscow Kremlin, the Orlov is commonly compared to half of a hen’s egg. Where the 189.62-carat stone began is no longer known, though the tale most often told is a colourful one: a French soldier who had abandoned his post heard of a gem set as the eye of a deity in the temple at Srirangam, spent years posing as a convert to gain the inner sanctuary, and slipped away with the stone. An Armenian dealer named Shaffrass carried it to Amsterdam, where Count Grigory Orlov bought it in the hope of recovering the favour of Catherine the Great. The gesture won him nothing; the Empress accepted the diamond, attached the Count’s name to it, and had it fixed in her imperial sceptre. The rose cut and pale blue cast of the stone recall the vanished Great Mogul so closely that the two have been thought identical — but no proof has ever settled the matter.

Koh-i-Nûr — Mountain of Light

Older than any other of the celebrated diamonds, the Koh-i-Nûr — the Mountain of Light — surfaces in the historical record as early as 1304, when it lay with the rajahs of Malwa. Two centuries on, the invasion of India by Sultan Babur carried it into the hands of the Mughal emperors. The fifth of that line, Shah Jahan, had it placed as the peacock’s eye in his celebrated Peacock Throne. That throne was borne off by Nadir Shah of Persia when he overran Hindustan in 1739; following his murder in 1747 it was broken up and scattered, and neither it nor its diamonds were ever seen whole again.

The Excelsior

Unearthed at the Jagersfontein mine on 30 June 1893, the Excelsior came to 970 carats. Rather than surrender it to his overseer, the African labourer who found it took it directly to the mine’s manager, and for that honesty was rewarded with £500 and a horse complete with saddle and bridle. The crystal showed the unusual blue-white cast peculiar to Jagersfontein — the tint later classified as Jager — a colour eventually traced not to the diamond’s own body but to its fluorescence in daylight. In 1902 the Asscher Brothers cleaved it; the largest piece, a marquise of 69.80 carats, was named the Excelsior I.

The Regent

By tradition the Regent was discovered by a slave at the Parteal workings around 1701, hidden within the dressings of a wound he had cut into his own leg — a story that closes, as these always do, in betrayal and bloodshed, and that no record confirms. What can be documented is that in 1702 Thomas Pitt, Governor of Madras, paid dearly for a 426-carat rough and gave it his own name, the Pitt Diamond. Two years at the cutter’s wheel in England reduced it to a cushion brilliant of 141 carats, a stone whose colour and clarity still place it among the very finest ever cut.

In 1717 the rough’s owner found a buyer in Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, then Regent of France, who paid in the region of $650,000 — and the Pitt became Le Régent. Louis XV displayed it at his coronation of 1722 and afterward wore it in his hat. Carried off in the 1792 plundering of the royal store-house, it turned up a year later concealed in a Paris attic. Napoleon Bonaparte bought it back outright in 1801 and had the goldsmith Nitot set it into the hilt of his sword. In later reigns it passed across the crowns of Louis XVIII, Charles X and Napoleon III, and into the diadem of the Empress Eugénie. The great sale of the French crown jewels in 1883 left it deliberately unsold, and it stands today in the Louvre.