A short history of pearls
Four thousand years as the rarest thing in the world, then a century as something you could wear.
Until 1893 every round pearl on earth was found by chance in a wild shell, which is why they were worth more than diamonds and why only courts and fortunes wore them. Culturing changed that in a single lifetime. Freshwater farming in China changed it again. This is the short version.
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c. 2300 BC
The oldest pearl jewelry
Pearls appear in the graves of the Arabian Gulf and in Chinese records from the Shang dynasty, gathered by divers from wild oysters. For four thousand years that is the only way a pearl is found: by chance, one in many thousands of shells.
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1st century BC
Cleopatra's wager
Pliny tells of Cleopatra dissolving a pearl in vinegar and drinking it to win a bet with Mark Antony over the cost of a single meal. The story is probably false and the chemistry is doubtful, but it records what a pearl was then: the most valuable object a person could own.
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13th century
Buddhas grown in mussels
In Zhejiang, the province our farms are in, farmers slip small tin figures of the Buddha inside freshwater mussels and return them to the water, where the mussels coat them in nacre. Tradition credits Ye Jinyang of Huzhou. These are flat blister pearls rather than round ones, but they are the first pearls anyone set out to grow.
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1500s
The age of exploration
Spanish ships bring pearls from the Americas to Europe in such quantities that the century is called the Pearl Age. Portraits of every court show ropes of them. Supply still depends entirely on finding them in the wild.
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1579
La Peregrina
A pear-shaped pearl the size of a pigeon's egg is found off Panama and passes through the Spanish crown, Napoleon's family and eventually Elizabeth Taylor. It sells in 2011 for over eleven million dollars, the record for a single pearl.
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c. 1665
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Johannes Vermeer paints a girl in a blue and yellow turban, one large pearl at her ear catching the light from a window. Its size and the way it is painted have led some to suggest it is glass or polished tin rather than a pearl at all. It is the most famous pearl in art all the same.
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1857
The Queen Pearl
Jacob Quackenbush opens mussels from Notch Brook, near Paterson, New Jersey, and finds a large round pearl. It passes through Tiffany to the Empress Eugénie of France, and sets off pearl rushes on rivers across the United States, as thousands go looking for the next one in freshwater mussels.
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1890s
The Gilded Age
American fortunes buy up the world's pearls. In 1917 Cartier acquires its Fifth Avenue mansion in exchange for a double strand of natural pearls valued at a million dollars. The building is still there; the strand, resold in 1957, fetched a hundred and fifty thousand.
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1893
Mikimoto cultures a pearl
Kokichi Mikimoto produces the first cultured half-pearl in Japan; round cultured pearls follow within two decades. For the first time pearls can be grown rather than found, and over the next fifty years the price of a strand falls from a fortune to a wedding present.
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1930s
The Gulf pearl trade collapses
Japanese cultured pearls reach the market just as the Depression ends the demand for luxuries. Within a decade the Gulf's pearl trade, four thousand years old, has all but gone. Bahrain strikes oil in 1932, and many of the divers go to work in the oil fields.
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1970s to today
China and the freshwater pearl
Farmers around Zhuji learn to culture pearls in freshwater mussels, without a bead, producing solid-nacre pearls in quantity. Quality rises through the 1990s and 2000s until the best freshwater strands rival saltwater pearls. Zhuji now grows most of the pearls in the world.
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Now
Pearls at auction, and on the neck
Natural pearls still set records at auction. Cultured pearls, meanwhile, have become what they were always going to be once they could be grown: real jewelry that can be worn on any occasion.
