GemWise: Chinese Pearls:The Re-Emergence of Quality
Its been a long, long road. The first known account of pearl culturing in China dates to 1086 (Donkin 1998). In modern times, China has been producing commercial quantities of freshwater pearls since the 1970s.
From the early 70s the best of the small production coming from a small number of Chinese farms were sold to the Japanese. The pearls were almost impossible to tell from the expensive Lake Biwa production and once they reached Tokyo, they were miraculously converted to Japanese pearls and sold as such. By 1978, fully 60% of Japanese "Biwa" exports consisted of pearls made in China (Strack 2006).
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