Sri Lanka: The Gem Island

Ceylon, Sapphires & Serendipity

- STEVE VOYNICK

Sri Lanka, formerly known as Ceylon, Ceilão and Sarandib, has been synonymous with colored gemstones for more than 2,000 years. The island nation is famed for its unusually wide variety of gemstones that include spinel, topaz, moonstone, chrysober-yl, garnet, zircon, tourmaline, ruby and, most importantly, the blue and star varieties of sapphire. Sri Lanka's sapphires are among the largest and most beautiful ever found. Over the centuries, they have earned places in the world's leading museums and royal crown-jewel collections.

Over more than two millennia of mining colored gemstones, Sri Lanka has had its ups and downs. But today, after enduring 443 years of exploitive European colonization, a civil war and a period of technological stagnation that nearly ruined its gem industry, Sri Lanka is again a major player in the international gem markets.

THE "JEWELS OF SARANDIB"

Located in the Indian Ocean off the southern tip of India, the island nation of Sri Lanka, 270 miles long and 140 miles wide, is roughly the size of the state of Florida. At its nearest point, it is just 30 miles from the Indian mainland.

Even during ancient times, Europeans knew of Sri Lanka's abundance of gemstones.

In the 2nd century C.E., the Roman astronomer and geographer Claudius Ptolemy noted that the island, then called Sarandib, produced "sapphire, beryl and other fine gems." Throughout the first millennium C.E., Persian, Arab and Chinese merchants regularly visited the island to acquire the "jewels of Sarandib." In 1296, Marco Polo became the first European to visit what is now Sri Lanka.