Tourmaline

Item Description

A stunning combination piece of the weird, rare, "mushroom-style" tourmalines that came out of some strange and very old tourmaline-bearing pegmatites in Burma, in the late 1990s. You do not see a lot of them today for several reasons, including that most original owners simply keep them. The matrix here is a nest of feldspar and quartz that holds up a majestic, 4.5-cm-tall tourmaline, accented perfectly by two sharp quartz crystals that ingrown into the tourmaline scepter cap as if they hold it up for us. Few matrix pieces ever existed to be had, in part due to the lack of education about mining for mineral specimens at the time these came out in the late 1990s, and before the internet had really penetrated to Burma for value education as well. Without understanding how to collect matrix pieces AND preserve value by doing so carefully, you find that most older deposits are suspiciously weak on matrix specimens. They were simply harder to collect. This is a previously unreleased specimen from the Larson Burma collection. Few of these ever came out on matrix, and fewer still in such balance and without damage as this piece. Bill Larson traveled to Burma dozens of times and built the largest personal collection of Burma minerals on earth, prior to 2008 (actually, probably the largest, even including museums). He has held the collection since that time, and we were honored to purchase it in 2020 and start bringing it to market through irocks.com and mineralauctions.com. For a lot more information on the amazing Larson Burma collection, built over 40 years of going to Burma, see our gallery website at: https://www.irocks.com/burma-and-spinels-in-my-collection. Valued approx. $10,000 for quality, aesthetics, balance, provenance, all of the above. Note that this is NOT modern material and although Burma mining is reduced and exports are on and off illegal now, this was mined 20 years or more ago anyways (prior to 2008 when he stopped adding to the collection such things) and is totally unique to that place and time. Even if they were mining now, we would not get more of these.