Do you know Alashan grape agate stone? It is produced in Su Hongtu, Alxa League, Inner Mongolia. The stone is as hard as jade, with a hardness of 6.5-7 degrees on the Mohs scale, crystal clear, bright colors, light red to dark purple, mostly translucent, and strange shape. The stone body is covered with beaded agate balls of different sizes and natural colors, layered on top of each other, resembling a bunch of crystal clear grapes, hence the name. Some stones occasionally have fish-eye-like agate beads.
Alxa, which means "colorful land" in Mongolian, is known as the sacred land of Alxa and the secret land of Alxa in China. The vast Gobi land, especially the northern part of the Alxa Zuoqi, produces different types of Gobi stones, and its texture, color, shape and charm are first-class.
Alashan grape agate is layered, corrugated, lustrous like wax, slightly transparent or opaque. The main ones are light blue, green, red, purple, white, black, brown. In addition, some agates have a variety of colors intertwined to form some unique and novel patterns, thus showing colorful effects.
Because of its bright colors and beauty, this agate has been cherished by people since ancient times and has been given many other names. Among them, those with undulating ostrich feathers are called "feather agate", and some with five colors are called "masked agate".
Alxa grape agate is the product of an undersea volcanic eruption 200 million years ago. They are rich in color, such as rust red, purple, transparent color, etc. These natural agate balls are stacked on top of each other like bunches of grapes, hence the nickname grape agate. What's even more peculiar is that some grape agate agate beads will also have a few fisheye-like. Since the discovery of grape agate stone in Inner Mongolia in 1995, this strange stone has quickly become popular with stone connoisseurs and collectors.
The main component of grape agate is silica, which is formed in a large cavity near the crater. Silica gel hydrothermal fluid can not fill the entire space, will sand soil, water droplets and other particles condensed into bead balls or water droplets, and then attached to the pre-formed beads, or hung on the roof of the cave, or longer than the bottom of the cave, or hung on the cave wall, the longer and larger, forming a bunch of grape shape. In the long years that followed, the cave was filled with mud, and grape agate was mostly buried in the soil, which also served as a good protection.
Alxa grape agate stone is a new stone species discovered by stone friends in Alxa in the 80s of the twentieth century, which is now difficult to find due to excessive mining, so it is collected and cherished.