Pearl education
The history of pearls
Pearls were the most valuable gem on earth for several thousand years, and almost every pearl you can buy today comes from an industry younger than the motor car.
That gap is the whole story. Until the very end of the nineteenth century a pearl was something found, by a diver holding his breath, one shell at a time. Finding any pearl was uncommon. Finding a fine one ran to something closer to one shell in ten thousand. Within forty years of Kokichi Mikimoto's first success the natural pearl trade was finished as a commercial force, and pearls had gone from the rarest of gems to something a person could reasonably expect to own.
The cross photographed here was sold by Tiffany in 1878, fifteen years before the first cultured pearl existed. Every pearl in it was found.
I have spent close to thirty years in this trade and I still find the compression of it remarkable. Most of what follows happened inside a single lifetime.
~ Jeremy Shepherd, Founder and CEO of Pearl Paradise
Everything before 1893
When pearls were found, not grown
For most of recorded history a pearl was an accident that someone had to go and find. Divers worked the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Mannar, the Red Sea and the Gulf of California, opening thousands of shells for a single pearl worth keeping. That ratio is why pearls sat above almost every other gem in value, and why they belonged to royalty rather than to anyone else.
The shell mattered as much as the pearl, and in several places it mattered more. In northern Australia, Aboriginal communities used and traded pearl shell long before European settlement, and shell from the Kimberley moved through trade networks that reached far inland. In the nineteenth century Broome grew into one of the great pearling centers of the world, and it was built on shell for buttons and inlay rather than on pearls. The same was true in the Sulu Archipelago and across the Pacific, where the dark shell of the black-lip oyster was the commodity and the occasional pearl was a bonus.
Those fisheries were finite and they were worked hard. Mexico closed its Gulf of California beds to fishing permanently in 1939, after more than four hundred years of harvest, which effectively ended the region's natural pearl industry.
I was invited to see that collection in 2009. It sits on an upper floor of a bank in Deira rather than in a public museum, and it holds more than fifty kilograms of natural Gulf pearls, assembled by Sultan Ali Al-Owais, who came from a pearl-merchant family, and later given to the bank.
Standing in front of it is the fastest way I know to understand the old trade. Every pearl in that mound was found. Somebody dove for each one, on a breath, and opened the shell by hand. Fifty kilograms is a number until you see it heaped up, and then it is several lifetimes of work by a great many people.
The whole industry, in order
A timeline
Every date below is the first of its kind. Read it top to bottom and the shape of the modern trade appears.
China cultures the first blister pearls
Farmers place small objects, most often Buddha figures, between the shell and mantle of a freshwater mussel and let nacre grow over them. The earliest documented deliberate pearl cultivation.
Mikimoto starts work in Ago Bay
Kokichi Mikimoto establishes an experimental farm on Benten-shima, Mie Prefecture. His goal is not round pearls but reproducing the Chinese blister method. Thousands of oysters die.
The first cultured pearls
Mikimoto harvests cultured blister pearls using shell nuclei. They are hemispherical rather than round, but it is the first commercially successful cultured pearl production in a saltwater mollusk. He patents the process in 1896.
Mise and Nishikawa solve the round pearl
Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa independently work out that a bead nucleus implanted together with a small piece of donor mantle tissue will produce a whole round pearl. A patent dispute ends in an agreement, and the technique becomes the Mise-Nishikawa method. It is still the basis of nearly every cultured pearl grown anywhere today.
Round akoya at scale
Mikimoto adopts the Mise-Nishikawa method and begins large-scale cultivation of round akoya pearls. This is the beginning of the modern cultured pearl industry.
Freshwater pearls at Lake Biwa
Dr Masao Fujita harvests a small number of whole freshwater pearls grown with bead nuclei in Lake Biwa. Marketed to India as Fujita Rose Pearls, they never find a sustainable commercial footing.
The word cultured is settled
After years of legal challenge, the First International Jewellers' Congress formally adopts the term cultured pearls, establishing the distinction between a natural pearl and one formed through human intervention.
Mikimoto takes cultured pearls to the World's Fair
A replica of the Liberty Bell, built in cultured pearls and diamonds, is shown at the New York World's Fair. It is an argument as much as an object: cultured pearls presented to America as a real gem, at a moment when much of the trade still refused to accept them.
Pearls grown without a bead
Fujita succeeds in growing freshwater pearls from mantle tissue alone, with no nucleus at all. The pearls are solid nacre throughout. This is the technique behind Biwa pearls and, later, most of Chinese freshwater production.
Mikimoto dies at 96
He is still discussing plans for another fifteen farms on the day he dies. In the same year, John Latendresse founds the Tennessee Shell Company, which will supply most of the world's bead nuclei from American river mussels.
The Diamond Policy
Japan adopts overseas production restrictions, known in English as the Diamond Policy: the techniques stay in Japan, overseas production returns to Japan for marketing, and volume is controlled. It governs much of the global industry for over forty years.
South Sea pearls begin at Kuri Bay
Japanese technique meets Australian shell in Western Australia. The first successful harvests follow soon after, proving that the far larger and more difficult Pinctada maxima can be farmed commercially.
The first cultured black pearls
French veterinary surgeon Jean-Marie Domard brings Japanese grafting expertise to French Polynesia. The grafter Churoku Muroi, sent by Nippon Pearls of Tokyo, operates on black-lip oysters at Hikueru in the Tuamotus.
China enters freshwater production
Commercial production begins following research by Professor Xiong Daren at the Fisheries Institute of Zhanjiang. For years much of the harvest is sold into Japan and mixed with Biwa pearls, and international buyers do not know China is producing.
The first round Tahitian pearl
Two years after the founding of the Societe Perliere de Manihi, the first round Tahitian cultured pearl is harvested. The category that will define French Polynesia's economy has begun.
The trade accepts that the color is real
Jewelers assume the dark pearls arriving from Tahiti must be dyed. Salvador Assael submits them to the GIA, which confirms the color is natural. Demand changes almost immediately.
Robert Wan acquires Marutea Sud
An accountant who entered the business a decade earlier becomes the defining figure of the Tahitian industry during its most dramatic period of growth.
China shifts from volume to quality
Producers abandon the cockscomb mussel, which could carry up to fifty small wrinkled pearls known in the trade as Rice Krispies, and return to the triangle sail mussel. Fewer pearls per shell, far better pearls.
The Diamond Policy ends
Economic pressure following the Asian financial crisis makes it impossible for Japanese banks and companies to keep financing overseas pearl operations at previous levels. Japanese control of the global industry formally loosens.
Bead-nucleated freshwater arrives
Fireball pearls reach the wholesale market. Luster and surface are poor at first. Within two decades bead nucleation will produce freshwater pearls that compete directly with saltwater on size and roundness.
Four industries, under pressure
Japanese akoya production has fallen to a fraction of its peak. French Polynesia has contracted since the 2007 recession. China dominates by volume and is moving upmarket. Climate and disease now set the ceiling on all of it.
Solid marker: a first. Open marker: a period rather than a single year.
The invention itself
Mikimoto, Mise and Nishikawa
Mikimoto is the name everyone knows, and the credit is more complicated than the name suggests.
What Mikimoto achieved in 1893 was a blister pearl: a hemisphere grown against the inside of the shell, attached to it, using the ancient Chinese principle. It was a genuine commercial breakthrough and it made him. It was not a round pearl.
The round pearl was solved separately, by Tatsuhei Mise and Tokichi Nishikawa working independently. Their insight was that the donor tissue, not the bead, is what matters. Implant a bead together with a small piece of mantle tissue from another oyster, and the epithelial cells in that tissue form a pearl sac around the bead and secrete nacre over it. A patent dispute followed and ended in an agreement allowing both to use the technique.
Nishikawa later married one of Mikimoto's daughters. Mikimoto adopted the method for commercial production and in 1916 began growing round akoya at scale.
That method, still called Mise-Nishikawa, is what every bead-nucleated pearl in the world is still grown by. Akoya, Tahitian, South Sea and the bead-nucleated freshwater pearls now coming out of China all trace back to it.
The fight nobody remembers
Whether they could be called pearls at all
Cultured pearls were not received as an innovation. They were received as a threat, and the natural pearl trade fought them in court.
The most visible opponent was the French dealer Leonard Rosenthal, who challenged Mikimoto in France and argued that cultured pearls should not legally be called pearls. Mikimoto prevailed, helped by scientific testimony including that of the English zoologist H. Lyster Jameson, who stated that cultured and natural pearls are identical apart from the circumstances of their formation.
In 1926 the First International Jewellers' Congress adopted the term cultured pearls, and the argument was over.
The word itself was a deliberate choice. In Japanese these were yoshoku shinju, meaning cultivated or aquaculture pearls, essentially pearls farmed in water. Cultured carried that sense of controlled cultivation while separating them from imitation, which was the real commercial danger.
Mikimoto answered the doubt in his own way. For the 1939 New York World's Fair he had a replica of the Liberty Bell built in cultured pearls and diamonds and put it in front of the American public. It is hard to think of a plainer argument: here is an American icon, rendered in the thing you have been told is not a real pearl.
A separate lineage, and an older one
The freshwater story
Freshwater pearls have their own history, and it starts several centuries before Mikimoto.
Chinese farmers were culturing blister pearls in freshwater mussels by at least the thirteenth century, inserting a shaped object between shell and mantle and letting nacre grow over it. Buddha figures were the most common form. The pearls stayed attached to the shell and were cut out, backed and finished afterwards. That technique, applied to saltwater and refined, is what produces mabe pearls today.
The modern freshwater industry runs through Japan. Dr Masao Fujita began experimenting at Lake Biwa in the 1920s and harvested bead-nucleated freshwater pearls in 1924. Working with akoya, he noticed that small pearls sometimes formed in mantle tissue when a bead was rejected, and correctly worked out that they came from epithelial cells shed by the donor tissue rather than from any nucleus. That observation led him, by the 1940s, to grow pearls from tissue alone.
Biwa pearls followed and reached international markets after the war. Because they had no bead, many were sold as natural, intentionally or otherwise, until Indian buyers recognized what they were in the 1950s and withdrew. Pollution around Lake Biwa ended commercial production by the 1980s.
China took the technique and scaled it beyond anything Japan had attempted. Today one country produces the overwhelming majority of the world's pearls by volume, and the lineage runs directly back to a lake in Shiga Prefecture.
How the technology left Japan
The Diamond Policy
By the time Mikimoto died in 1954, Japan controlled essentially all commercial pearl cultivation technology, processing and distribution. Protecting that position became national policy.
In 1955 Japan adopted a set of overseas production restrictions known in English as the Diamond Policy, built on three principles: culturing techniques including tissue selection and nucleation were not to be shared freely outside Japan; pearls produced overseas were to be imported into Japan, where Japanese companies kept marketing and distribution control; and production volume was to be regulated to hold prices up.
For four decades, farms in Australia, French Polynesia, China and across Southeast Asia operated under Japanese technical supervision and Japanese financing through this system. The South Sea and Tahitian industries exist in their modern form because of it, and on its terms.
It ended in 1998, when the Asian financial crisis made it impossible for Japanese banks and companies to keep funding overseas operations at previous levels.
The policy is gone and its effects are not. A large share of the world's most experienced technicians, nucleators, processors and graders still trace their training back through it.
Where the other three came from
Australia, Tahiti and China
Everything outside Japan happened in the second half of the twentieth century, and all of it began with Japanese technique carried abroad.
South Sea, from 1956
Australia had the shell and Japan had the method. After the war the two came together, and the Kuri Bay pearl farm in Western Australia was established in 1956. Applying bead nucleation to Pinctada maxima was far harder than to akoya: a larger, slower, more sensitive animal, farmed in remote tropical water, with years between operation and harvest. It worked, and the technique spread to the Philippines, Indonesia and Myanmar.
Tahitian, from 1961
Jean-Marie Domard brought Japanese grafting expertise to French Polynesia, and Churoku Muroi performed the first successful operations on black-lip oysters at Hikueru. The Societe Perliere de Manihi followed in 1968 and the first round Tahitian pearl was harvested in 1970. The market then had to be persuaded the color was real, which took GIA testing and most of the decade.
China, from the 1960s
Commercial freshwater production began after research by Professor Xiong Daren at Zhanjiang. Early output was small and largely hidden inside the Japanese trade. By the late twentieth century China supplied nearly all the world's freshwater pearls, first as cheap wrinkled rice pearls, then, after the shift back to the triangle sail mussel in the 1990s, as something far better.
There is an American chapter too, and it is smaller than it deserves to be. John Latendresse founded the Tennessee Shell Company in 1954 and supplied the American mussel shell that most of the world's bead nuclei were cut from. He then spent years adapting Japanese technique to native North American mussels, and established commercial freshwater pearl farming at Birdsong Creek in the early 1980s. Production never approached Asian scale, and commercial cultivation there ended after his death in 2000.
Where it leaves us
A young industry, already under strain
The whole modern trade is about a hundred and ten years old, and every part of it is now dealing with the same pressures at once.
Japanese akoya production peaked above a hundred tons a year and fell to roughly 13.2 tons in 2023, the lowest level recorded since modern statistics began, under warming water, red tide, an aging workforce and a disease affecting juvenile shells. French Polynesia expanded too fast in the 1990s, was hit by the 2007 recession, and contracted sharply. South Sea farming depends on remote marine environments that climate change is making less predictable. China dominates by volume and is spending its effort on moving upmarket.
What has not changed is the biology. A pearl is still produced by an animal that has to stay alive, in clean water, for years. Every improvement in the last century has been an improvement in the odds, never a shortcut.
What did change is where the rarity sits. It used to be in finding a pearl at all, which is what that mound in Dubai represents. Now it is in finding one with the luster, the surface, the shape and the color worth paying for. The difficulty moved. It did not go away.
