Blue Blooded Stones and the Prisoner in the Crystal Cage

You have no doubt heard about blood diamonds, and know that they are not rare red versions of the gemstone, but illicitly mined diamonds used to finance and prolong armed conflicts in some African countries. But have you heard of blue blooded stones? An elaborate marking system known as the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme is currently used, although some claim inefficiently, to sort good diamonds (for example, from Botswana) from blood diamonds that should not be allowed into the market. No such scheme is needed for the blue stones named lapis lazuli, as there is only one mine in the world that produces highquality stones—the Sar-e Sang mine in the Kokcha valley in the Badakhshan province in north-eastern Afghanistan—so there is never any doubt about where they come from. The mine is in such a remote area that even prolific travellers like Marco Polo and Sir Richard Burton never made it there, although Polo refers to them in his travels when crossing the river Oxus (also known as the Amu Darya) of which the Kokcha is a tributary: ‘a mountain in that region where the fi nest azure in the world is found.’ A Scottish explorer, John Wood, visited in 1837, but if his book Journey to the Source of the River Oxus is to be believed, it wasn’t exactly a Sunday School excursion either: ‘If you wish not to go to destruction, avoid the narrow valley of Koran [Kokcha],’ he summarized. One who finally made it there was the British journalist Victoria Finlay, author of the wonderful Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox , and, although reaching the mine in the beginning of the 2000s, this was still quite an achievement. Why would anyone endure various kinds of hardships just to see a mine where you can whack out blue stones from the interior of a mountain? Perhaps because these rare stones have achieved tremendous value over the ages, being the hallmark of kings and aristocracy, or because the trade in them covered such distances even in ancient times, or maybe because this mine is possibly the oldest in the world that is still being worked, having been in business for 5,000–6,000 years.