The Hope Diamond
Cut in the seventeenth century; recut about 1812
In a darkened room at the end of the gem hall, a deep blue diamond the size of a walnut turns slowly on a stand inside a glass case. It weighs just over forty-five carats and is surrounded by sixteen white diamonds, hanging from a chain of forty-five more. The colour is what stops people: a steely, slightly greyish blue that most diamonds never have. It comes from traces of boron trapped in the crystal when it formed deep in the Earth more than a billion years ago. The stone also has a strange secret, which is that under ultraviolet light it glows red for several seconds after the light is switched off.
The diamond was mined in India, probably at the Kollur mine in Golconda, and reached Europe in the seventeenth century in a rougher form of more than a hundred carats. The French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier sold it to Louis the Fourteenth, who had it cut into the French Blue, a heart-shaped stone for the crown jewels. It vanished in the looting of the royal treasury during the Revolution in 1792 and reappeared in London some twenty years later, recut into its present shape, in the collection of the banker Henry Philip Hope, whose name it still carries. Look closely at the girdle of the stone and you can see that the cut is not perfectly symmetrical, a trace of that hurried recutting.
The jeweller Harry Winston bought the diamond in 1949 and gave it to the Smithsonian in 1958, sending it by registered mail in a plain brown paper package. The postage cost a little over two dollars, though the insurance was much more. It has been the museum's most famous object ever since and is seen by millions of people a year. Stories of a curse attached to the stone were largely invented by dealers to make it more glamorous, but they persist, and visitors often pause a little longer because of them.
Did You Know? Harry Winston mailed the diamond to the Smithsonian in 1958 through the ordinary post, in a brown paper parcel.
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