One
The vast expanse of the sea is deep, hiding endless treasures. Beautiful sea shells thrive on the ocean floor, and their colorful colors and coral formations create a beautiful ocean landscape. Pearl oysters are mollusks that live on the ocean floor, living in tropical and subtropical oceans, and they live on shallow rocks and coral reefs with their filaments. Since ancient times, pearl oysters have been endowed with many beautiful and magical legends.
Beautiful pearl shells
In ancient Greek and Roman mythology, the "goddess of love and beauty" is called Venus, the water droplets on her body can be transformed into pure and immaculate pearls, Venus is a kind and loving goddess in people's hearts, in charge of human love, marriage, fertility, and the growth and reproduction of all animals and plants, her Venus Greek name is Aphrodite, translated into Chinese is a very beautiful name, "the goddess born of waves".
In the waves and bubbles of the ocean, a golden shell opened, and inside was a young girl with long golden hair, she had a beautiful face and a healthy figure, her eyes revealed wisdom and elegance, her slender neck and pearly white body were as smooth as silk, and the water droplets on her body dripped down, turning into white and immaculate pearls, and it was said that Venus, the "goddess of love and beauty", was born from the beautiful sea shell.
Famous statue "Venus with a Broken Arm"
The famous Italian painter Of the Renaissance, Bodi Celli, painted the mythical and legendary Venus goddess, the Venus in the painting is soft, warm, slightly shy, eyes staring into the distance, eyes full of fantasy, confusion and sadness.
Botti Celi borrowed "The Birth of Venus" to express a neoplatonic philosophical trend that was popular in Florence at that time: beauty cannot be gradually perfected or produced from non-beauty, beauty can only be self-completed, it is incomparable, and beauty is eternal and immortal. Perhaps it is the emotion of the author's painting, the goddess Venus in the painting appears confused and sad, lacking the bodybuilding and elegance of the classical statue.
Bodi Chelli's painting The Birth of Venus
In China, there is also a legend that pearls come from tears, according to the "Book of Searching gods": "There are fish people outside the South China Sea, and the water lives like a fish, and they do not waste weaving." Its eyes cry out of beads. ”
The "Taiping Royal Chronicle" tells such a story, saying that there is a kind of mermaid in the South China Sea that comes out of the water to play, lives in people's homes for many days, sees the rice tank empty, the owner will go to sell silk, the mermaid asks the master for a vessel, and the weeping tears become beads filled with a plate to give to the master.
There is another beautiful legend about the tears of the South China Sea fish people, in the South China Sea, there are fish women, who are good at weaving a thin cicada-like wing, smooth as gelatin silk, called fish silk. The market for the mackerel women is called the sea market, which is what people usually call the mirage, and the fish women often exchange products with each other in the sea market. If humans wear clothes made of mackerel, they can walk into the mirage and have fun with the mackerel. According to legend, the fish girl was the servant of the moon goddess Chang'e, and because she did something wrong, she punished Chang'e to weave silk in the sea. On the night of the full moon, they often stand on the cliffs, look at the moon, sad and weeping, and the tears that fall will turn into pearls.
The legendary South Sea Fish Man
In the face of such a beautiful legend, the Tang Dynasty poet Li Shangyin had a feeling and wrote down the ancient famous sentence "There are tears in the pearls of the sea and the moon, and the blue field is warm and the jade is smoke".
Two
Pearl is an ancient organic gemstone found primarily in pearl shellfish and mother-of-pearl mollusks. Pearls are calcium carbonate mineral beads produced by shellfish endocrine action, which are formed by a large number of tiny aragonite crystals.
When a tiny foreign particle enters the living tissue of the pearl oyster, the pearl begins to form. In order to protect themselves, pearl oysters are coated with layers of coatings on the particles, which are composed of a kind of calcium carbonate, which is a homogeneous light-reflecting substance, which determines the color of the inner layer of the pearl shell.
Pearls are rich in variety, different shapes, colorful, pearl colors are gold, white, pink, light yellow, light green, light blue, brown, lilac, black, etc., usually white pearls are the most common, golden pearls are extremely rare.
Colorful pearls
Three
Golden-lipped oysters are considered to be the largest pearl oysters in the world, reaching up to 30 cm in diameter and are abundant in the cultivation bases around palawan in the Philippines.
It's a protected part of the Pacific Ocean, and the first golden pearls produced on Palawan were bred from remnants of wild golden-lipped shellfish. Natural golden-lipped shells are distributed around Palawan, and wild pearls that were once naturally formed are now difficult to find.
Excellent quality gold pearls
Compared to wild pearls, cultured pearls are more rounded and smooth. Although there is a strict 5-year standard for the artificial culture of golden-lipped oyster pearls, there is still no guarantee that every pearl will grow flawlessly.
For the first two years, farmers hand-in-hand feed the gill-lipped larvae, which are called "baby oysters", until they can reach the size standard of pearl-forming in the body. Next, the workers need to subtly transplant a small piece of shell into the body of the golden lip shell without harming the golden lip shell, and over time, this small shell will become the pearl core of the golden lip shell.
The cultivation of golden lip shells is harsh on the water environment, and the water temperature cannot be lower than 29.5 °C, nor can it be higher than 31C, otherwise the golden lip shells will die. The seas where golden-lipped shells are farmed must be rich in oxygen and receive moderate amounts of sunlight to ensure that there are enough plankton to feed on golden-lipped shellfish.
The flow rate of the water should be moderate, and the water flow is too small to transport the plankton to the golden lip shell for replenishment, and if the water flow is too large, they will feel stressed. The water quality of the cultured sea must be kept clean, and contaminants can enter the golden lip shell, which will affect the quality of the pearls produced.
These golden-lipped shells, along with their underlying pearls, are then placed in trays in seawater. There they will go through another 3 years of cultivation time. Farmers monitor each lip shell on a daily basis to monitor whether they are under survival pressure and to detect contamination of the surrounding water quality. In addition, workers chased away carnivorous fish and carefully removed parasites and algae from the shells of golden-lipped shells. For the entire 5 years, workers caring for golden lip shells were unable to see the pearls that were growing.
Underwater pearl tray
During the harvest season, trained technicians must patiently remove the new pearls without harming the golden lip shells. These pearls are then sorted and imported into the market for people to use.
Now, jewelry farms on Palawan sustain the species. After producing a number of pearls, the farm's golden-lipped shells will be carefully sent back to the ocean, allowing them to reproduce naturally for the rest of their lives, re-enriching the Pacific Ocean with their golden treasures.
Underwater pearl oysters
Four
A Filipino fisherman found a 34-kilogram giant pearl in the waters off Puerto Princesa on Palawan, which is considered the largest pearl in the world.
According to Philippine media reports, a Fisherman in the Philippines picked up a stone weighing 34 kilograms, but he did not know that the stone was a valuable pearl, so he put it under the bed for more than a decade. It is reported that this pearl is the largest known pearl in the world, five times larger than the Pearl of Allah, and its value may be as high as 100 million US dollars.
In an interview, the fisherman said the pearl was found during a fishing trip at sea when she encountered a storm at sea, and after dropping the anchor, the anchor was stuck by the stones below, he dived to remove the anchor, and found a huge pearl during the dive. At first, he didn't know the value of the pearl, so he put it as a lucky stone in his wooden house. He had a fire in his home this year, and when he cleaned up his finances and moved, he remembered that the pearl was handed over to the local tourism office.
The local tourist office staff said we were all very surprised when he brought the pearls. The pearl is about 30 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters long, and tourism officials said they would place the pearl in the municipal government to attract more tourists and promote the development of local tourism.
The world's largest pearl, it looks like a giant hand
Five
Common pearls are round, but pearls are not all round, and the larger the pearl, the more irregular its shape will be. In the Philippines, there is a strangely shaped pearl, some people call it a religious pearl, and some people call it a Lao Tzu pearl.
The discovery of this pearl originated from an accident, a child was caught in a shell, and when he rescued, he pulled the child out with the shell and accidentally found the pearl. The magic of Lao Tzu's pearls is that when you look at the pearls from different directions, you can see the three icons of Shakyamuni, Confucius and Lao Tzu, and we have no way of knowing how this miraculous phenomenon came into being.
Professionals have identified Lao Tzu pearls as 21 mm in diameter, 139 mm wide, weighing 6.35 kg and worth up to $23 million.
Lao Tzu pearls
Six
Pearls have a wide range of effects, complete pearls are often used as ornaments, and pearls are ground into powders with medicinal and cosmetic effects.
Volume 64 of the Compendium of Materia Medica records as follows: "Pearls are salty in taste, sweet and cold and non-toxic. Calm the eye. Painted, moisturizing good color. Apply hands and feet, remove skin and reverse the skin, fall sputum, remove facial spots, stop leakage. In addition to the children's fever, requiem. Stop the sperm white turbidity, detoxify acne and cure poison. ”
Tao Hongjing of the Liang Dynasty said in the "Collection of Materia Medica" that pearls "have the effect of curing the skin of the eyes and stopping leakage". The Tang Dynasty's "Sea Medicine Materia Medica" believes that pearls can be blinding, dizziness, and anti-discharge. In the Yuan Dynasty, people often added honey and pearl powder to drink in water, believing that it could both nourish and prevent heat.
The Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China and the Dictionary of Chinese Medicines all point out that pearls have the effect of calming the nerves, removing the eyes, detoxifying and generating muscles, etc. Modern research has also shown that pearl powder has a unique role in improving human immunity, delaying aging, removing spots and whitening, supplementing calcium, etc.
Pearl mill powder can be used in medicine
Seven
Pearls are divided into South Sea Pearl, Tahiti Pearl, Seawater Pearl and Freshwater Pearl according to the place of origin. Pearls are usually graded according to five criteria, namely the five quality elements of pearls.
1. Luster: Luster is the most important factor in determining the quality of pearls, the longer the formation time of pearls, the thicker the bead layer, the smoother the surface of the pearl, the better the luster of the pearl, and also shows that the longer the quality life of the pearl.
2. Appearance: There will be some marks of life on the surface of the pearl, including bumps, depressions, fine lines, flaws, dark spots and ring belts, etc., these marks are as different as human fingerprints, and the surface of the pearl cannot be artificially processed, so flawless pearls are very rare.
3. Shape: The shape of pearls is varied, the perfect circle is rare, and some other special shapes of high-quality pearls are very rare.
4. Size: The size of the pearl mainly refers to the diameter length of the pearl approximate to the round category. Generally speaking, the larger the relative diameter of pearls in the same category of pearls, the more precious they are. The value of a pearl varies greatly for every 1 millimeter increase.
5. Color: The color of pearls is colorful and varies widely. The various natural colors that pearls possess have less effect on quality and preciousness, and basically depend on the wearer's personal taste and skin tone.
Combining the above five evaluation factors, there is no pearl with the exact same pearl, and even in the 100 kg of raw pearls, only a few high-grade gem-grade pearls can be selected, which shows the preciousness of high-quality pearls.
There are many different pearl-producing regions in the world
(Text Editor: Sun Dong)