Rubellite Tourmaline

Item Description

This broad, flaring, deep maroon red tourmaline crystal is a stunning and balanced example of the material that came out around 2005, from a single HUGE pocket in Vietnam that remains unique to this day. Some crystals were more straight and normal, but this has the flaring shape and spreading termination of the best of them, and is in perfect condition and complete all around. It has long been in the comprehensive single gem crystal collection of Gene Meieran, and is valued $10,000-15,000 today. It comes with a lucite base (a fine enough base although not made by us, so the style of bbevels does not match our own). I remember trying to arrange travel and funds to purchase it, but a European dealer beat everybody to it. From a wonderful article in the Mineralogical Record, we will cite this fascinating incidental information about the find here, a modern rediscovery at a long lost location! The Mineralogical Record (Vol. 38, Issue 6), article by Dr. Wendell Wilson: The Minh Tien pegmatite, located a few kilometers southeast of the town of Luc Yen in northern Vietnam, has yielded large and attractive divergent clusters of pink and raspberry-red to yellow-green and yellow-orange tourmaline (elbaite, rossmanite and possibly liddicoatite) in recent years. The first published reference to a specimen from the occurrence (though the site is not named) may well date back to 1795.
THE AVA TOURMALINE
Between 1811 and 1820 James Sowerby (1757-1822) published a series of installments of descriptive text with hand-colored engravings of mineral specimens from countries outside of Great Britain, calling it Exotic Mineralogy. The illustration shown here was issued July 1, 1817, and depicts a tourmaline specimen in the British Museum which is essentially identical in habit and similar in size and color to the recently found specimens from the Minh Tien pegmatite; in addition, the coloring pattern of red ("rubellite") capped by a yellow-orange to pink zone may well be distinctive. Sowerby writes as follows about the specimen:
Although Rubellite is only a variety of Tourmaline, it is such an interesting one, that I have thought a figure of the most famous specimen yet known in the world, would be acceptable: it is that presented to Col. Symes by the King of Ava, in whose territories it was found. From Col. Symes it passed into the Grevillian collection, with which it was purchased, having been valued at [pounds sterling]500 (I was told that it was once valued by an eminent Oryktognost at 1000 guineas), for the British Museum, where it now stands, the pride of the mineral collection.