In 1908 the gem was bought for $400,000 by Abdul Hamid, Sultan of Turkey. With the breath of revolution on his neck, the Sultan three years later sent it to Paris to be sold. It became part of the famed collection of Mrs. Edward B. McLean, whose gems dazzled Washington, D. C., for almost forty years. After her death, it was bought in 1949 by Harry Winston, noted diamond merchant of New York.
The Jehan Akbar Shah
This diamond deserves distinction as the second great eye of the Peacock Throne of the Mogul Emperors. It was engraved with the names of Shah Akbar and his grandson, Shah Jehan. It weighed 116 carats. After Shah Jehan was deposed by his son in 1666, the stone disappeared. Precisely two hundred years later it was shown in Constantinople as the Shepherd stone. Recognized by the inscriptions, the diamond was bought by an English merchant. In London, it was recut to 71 carats, losing the inscriptions and sold to the Gaekwar of Baroda.
The Cullinan
The largest diamond ever discovered was found in 1905 in the Premier Mine in South Africa, which had been opened by Sir Thomas Cullinan. The rough stone, weighing 3,106 carats, about one and a third pounds, was bought by the Transvaal Government and presented to King Edward VII of England, in 1907, on his sixty-sixth birthday.
The Cullinan was sent to Amsterdam to be cut. There, after months of study, the expert set the cleaving blade on the diamond and tapped it with a heavy rod. The blade broke. On the second try, the expert fainted. He recovered to find the great diamond split precisely as planned. Out of the great Cullinan came nine major gems and ninety-six smaller brilliants. The greatest of the cuttings, called the Great Star of Africa, weighs 530 carats, and is the largest cut diamond in the world. It adorns the sceptre of the British Empire. The other large stones are also part of the British Crown jewels.
The Excelsior
Mention should be made of the Excelsior, a diamond of 995 carats, found in the Orange Free State in 1893 and, until the discovery of the Cullinan, the largest diamond known. The Excelsior was noticed by accident, seen by a native in a shovelful of gravel he was pitching onto a truck.
The stone was cut in 1903 by the same firm, Asscher of Amsterdam, that later cut the Cullinan; but the cutting is unique in that all the resulting stones—twenty-one gems—are either pear-shaped or marquise.