Whilst not everyone has access to a family tiara, you don’t need to be an oligarch, still less a duke, to notice if one’s tiara needs an upgrade.

The crown upgrade is very straightforward. Get a sapphire. There is nothing a sapphire cannot put right - for no stone sits more sumptuously on head, hand, or breast than the sapphire. The Sri Lankan sapphire, to be exact.

Quite apart from the orgone light that illuminates its wearers, it is, if some sapphire traders are to be believed, a not inconsequential medical aid. Claims that it helps combat cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic – to name but a few – are widespread, albeit untested.

Buddhists have long since taken this positive attitude to the stone one big step further, believing that sapphire accelerates spiritual enlightenment. Ellen Conroy, in her seminal 1921 book “The Symbolism of Colour”, quoted Buddhist texts that claimed the jewel produced peace of mind and equanimity: “it chases out evil thoughts by establishing healthy circulation. It opens barred doors to the spirit. It produces a desire for prayer. It brings peace, but he who would wear it must lead a pure and holy life.”

Like the claim for curing cataracts, inflammations, hair loss, skin diseases, nerve pain, rheumatism, and colic, this claim, winsome though it is, is also untested.

It is, say some Buddhists, nothing less than the transformative third eye – the one that symbolises clarity and insight, so enabling you to see beyond plain earthly things.

Less happily, the Chinese, traders with the island since ancient times, believed that sapphires were the congealed tears of Buddha - though this was not how Cleopatra was reputed to see the stone, using it with lavish application ground up in her eye shadow.

Clearly, though, the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires is deep and well beyond most measures of what is ancient. Gem mining here reaches back to at least the second century BCE, with the mention of a gem mine in The Mahavamsa, one of the island’s most ancient chronicles. However, if biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems are to be believed, the country’s mines can be dated back at least another 700 years.

25% of its total land area is gem-bearing, mostly around Ratnapura and, to a lesser extent, Elahera. Thanks to the extreme age of its rocks (90% are between 500 and 2.5 million years old), Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous that they often wash out onto floodplains and into rivers and streams.

Its waterfalls would make Cartier wince. Indeed, the mining of alluvial deposits by simple water-winnowing river mining was for long the classic technique used to find gemstones. Nowadays, brutalist earthmovers excavate the topsoil; though tunnel mining is mildly kinder to the environment, with pits 5 to 500 feet deep dug and tunnels excavated horizontally from them.

Sales of Sri Lanka’s gems boomed from a trifling $40 million in 1980 to over $473 million in 2022, a phenomenal acceleration promoted by two bouts of unusually effective government intervention: the establishment of the State Gem Corporation in 1971 and the 1993 Gem and Jewellery Authority Act.

With these moves, the government centralised and professionalised the issuance of gem-mining licenses and the leasing of government land for mining. They extended control over sales and exports and made it mandatory that gems discovered in mines be presented at public auctions, with the government receiving a 2.5% share of sales.

The industry’s value chain is almost as long as a piece of thread. Gem miners sell their stones to dealers, who sell to other dealers, who sell the rough rocks to cutter-polishers. Historically, these have usually been Ceylon Moors, descendants of Arab traders. The stones are then sold on to wholesalers and then retailers. And then to auctioneers, who often resell the rocks back to other consumers, or to retailers who resell them to new consumers. And so on, down all the ages of recorded time.

But of all its many types of Sri Lankan gems, mined in apparent inexhaustible plenty, it is sapphires that anyone with the merest hint of glitter associates with the country. Eighty-five per cent of the precious stones mined on the island are sapphires.

Blue as the morning, the ocean, the sky, sapphire, is most commonly red, purple, pink, gold, and lavender – the colour variety depending on the stone’s chemical composition.

Its green sapphires are addictively distinctive, but the island also excels at producing Hot Pink Sapphires. This yellow sapphire is apparently a good deterrent against witchcraft, as well as orange and white ones. And it is famous for a variant known as a padparadscha sapphire – from Padmaraga - a pink-orange stone, as converted as the grail or meaning of life.

But despite all this, the colour that gets the most acclaim is – of course - the Blue Sapphire, the blue of inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, blue sapphires are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”.

Long before Loos got round to writing “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” the country’s sapphires were the go-to gem for crowns, thrones, diadems, and later, accessories for First Nights and cocktail parties – and just to feeling special curled up in front of the television with a hot chocolate and a sapphire ring. Harly surprising then that over the centuries, eighteen of the island’s sapphires have won for themselves an ineradicable place in the hearts of collectors, connoisseurs, aficionados, enthusiasts, and experts. And, of course, auctioneers.

Despite being made to be worn, flaunted, and noticed, all but two of the country’s most famous sapphires are either trapped in museums or lost to the public eye.

One of the two you can see still worn is the Stuart Sapphire, last sported by Charles III at his coronation in Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 2023. Arguments – all but improvable – rage gently over this 104-carat stone that sits, God, at the top of the British crown, surrounded by supplicant diamonds. Is it from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India, or Burma? Most experts reckon it is from Sri Lanka, but its provenance is obscure, and it can only be reliably dated to Charles II and his brother, the hapless exile, James II.

Less controversial is the only other famous island sapphire still worn in public today - the Princess of Wales’s Engagement Ring. Compared to the other notable sapphires given by Sri Lanka to the world, Princess Diana’s Engagement Ring, now worn by the current Princess of Wales, Catherine, is best described as small but perfectly formed.

A mere twelve carats, this oval ring rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for his future wife, Lady Diana Spencer, in 1981. Her elder son later inherited it and, at some point between 2010 and 2011, resized it to fit the finger of his own fiancée, Kate Middleton, a brilliant blue reminder of Sri Lanka in any of the millions of photographs published of her around the world every week.

But...