Modern Pearls To Celebrate Chinese New Year

When considering the great pearl-jewelry lovers of the past, you might envision Elizabeth Taylor, who once owned (and almost lost) the enormous, 500-year-old La Peregrina pendant. Or Gabrielle Chanel, who famously decreed that every fashionable woman ought to own “ropes and ropes of pearls”. But there can be few pearl enthusiasts to match the Empress Dowager Cixi, who ruled over China, and some 400 million subjects, between 1861 and 1908. Early 20th-century portraits often portray Cixi, one of the world’s most powerful women, resplendent in pearls from top to toe: nacreous tassels swinging from her ornate headdress, an intricately latticed pearl cape about her shoulders, and her shoes completely encrusted in pearly beads. It’s even said that the empress was buried in a gown that was embroidered with thousands of seed pearls, and with another huge white gem placed in her mouth, to supposedly defend the imperial body against decay.

It’s widely known that jade is treasured in China, but pearls have been equally revered in the country for millennia, often much more so than gold. Indeed, the earliest written mention of pearls is in the historical Chinese ‘Book of Documents’, the Shu King, which dates from around 2300BC and records pearls being given as a tribute to the Emperor Yu, as well as a pearl-adorned ‘celestial globe’ being consulted for astrology. A well-known idiom, ‘a pearl in the palm’, is taken from a poem from around 300AD, and is still used to describe something precious today (usually a beloved child, like ‘the apple of one’s eye’).

Chinese folk tales also abound with magical pearls. Some depict the gem being created inside the head of a dragon or a snake, while others describe them as being formed of both sunlight and moonlight, then borne of water, making them an effective charm against fire or flood. Courtly ladies bedecked themselves in strands of pearls as a sign of their status and had them crushed into edible powder to ensure good health, flawless skin and even immortality. So vital were pearls to some parts of the country, such as the southern pearl-farming regions around Hepu, that ‘pearl’ was a popular name for both male and female children for more than 300 years.

To keep up with ancient demand, the Chinese had developed pearl-culturing techniques by the 11th century AD (centuries before the Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto perfected the method in the late 1890s). One set of instructions, from 1734, describes incubating mussels in ‘peace and quiet’, and nourishing them with ginseng, herbs and honey to ensure gems of sufficient beauty. It may have worked – the so-called ‘Sleeping Lion’, the world’s largest freshwater pearl, once owned by Catherine the Great, is thought to have originated in China around this time.

These days, China produces more cultured pearls than any other country (reportedly up to 95 percent of the world’s freshwater pearls), making it likely that there are Chinese pearls in your jewelry box right now. There is a cool cohort of contemporary fine-jewelry designers who are honoring the rich legacy and natural beauty of pearls while transporting them into the modern era, such as Jesse Marlo Lazowski, founder of Marlo Laz, whose 14-karat-gold necklace features Chinese freshwater pearls that rest like iridescent orbs upon the décolletage. Sophie Bille Brahe’s ‘Opera’ pearl earrings are equally decadent – a double strand of pearls almost grazes the shoulder, while State Property has updated a traditional toi et moi ring silhouette with a sleek, diamond-studded pearl. As talismans of good fortune, longevity and success, these new pearl pieces might just be the perfect gemstones to take us all into the Lunar New Year… and beyond.

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