Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

This growing fame was partly the result of Ranjit Singh’s preference for diamonds over rubies – a taste Sikhs tended to share with most Hindus, but not with the Mughals or Persians, who preferred large, uncut, brightly coloured stones. Indeed in the Mughal treasury, the Koh-i-Noor seems to have been only one among a number of extraordinary highlights in the greatest gem collection ever assembled, the most prized items of which were not diamonds at all, but the Mughals’ beloved red spinels from Badakhshan and, later, rubies from Burma.

On Krishna’s triumphant return to Dwarka with the Syamantaka, King Satrajit – ‘hanging his head in great shame’ – was so overcome with remorse at having falsely accused Krishna that in recompense he offered him the hand of his beautiful daughter, Princess Satyabhama. It was a happy marriage but the Syamantaka continued to generate envy and bloodshed all around it.

Even Buddhist literature, despite its austere embrace of poverty and asceticism, is pervaded with gemmological imagery:

According to an early Tamil text called the Tirukkailaya-nana-ula, a lovely woman at the peak of her youthful beauty should never be entirely naked, even in bed; instead her body’s beauty should be enhanced with gems:

She adorns her feet with a pair of anklets And stacks her wrists with heavy bangles Thickly encrusted with gems. She decks her hair with an impeccable garland Strung with gold thread And enlivens her shapely neck with jewels, Thus is she a match for Shri herself.

a woman’s naked and unornamented body is uninteresting and unerotic compared to one hung with jewels:

‘A woman may be noble, she may have good features. She may have a nice complexion, be filled with love, be shapely. But without ornaments, my friend, she is not beautiful. The same goes for poetry.’

In many ancient Indian courts, jewellery rather than clothing was the principal form of adornment

Kautilya’s Arthasastra,

Garcia da Orta is explicit that diamonds were not regarded as the pre-eminent gemstone by the Mughals – something which came as an enormous surprise to Europeans. In his Colloquies, da Orta has his interlocutor, Dr Ruano, remark that diamonds ‘are the king of stones, for [they have] eminence over pearls and emeralds and rubies, if we believe Pliny’. Da Orta, however, corrects him: ‘In this country … they think more of an emerald or of a ruby, which have more value if they are perfect, and size for size, than of a diamond. But as they do not find other stones when perfect and of good water so large as diamonds, it happens that they often fetch a higher price. The value of the stones is no more than the will of buyers and the need for them.’

Akbar’s imperial treasuries at the end of the sixteenth century: ‘The amount of revenues is so great,’ he writes, ‘and the business so multifarious, that twelve treasuries are necessary for storing the money, nine for the different kinds of cash payments, and three for precious stones, gold and inlaid jewellery.’ Rubies and spinels, divided into twelve classes, come first; diamonds – of which there are half the quantity of spinels and rubies – second, and these were kept mixed up with emeralds or blue corundum (sapphires), which the Mughals knew as blue yaquts. Pearls are in the third treasury: ‘If I were to speak of the quantity and quality of precious stones’ possessed by the emperor, he writes, ‘it would take me an age.’14

In a letter from the court of Emperor Jahangir to the future King Charles I, Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the court of the great Mughal, reported in 1616 that he had entered a world of almost unimaginable splendour. The emperor, he wrote, was: clothed, or rather laden with diamonds, rubies, pearls, and other precious vanities, so great, so glorious! His head, necke, breast, armes, above the elbowes, at the wrists, his fingers each one with at least two or three rings, are fettered with chaines of dyamonds, rubies as great as walnuts – some greater – and pearles such as mine eyes were amazed at … in jewells, which is one of his felicityes, hee is the treasury of the world, buyeing all that comes, and heaping rich stones as if hee would rather build [with them] than wear them.

In due course Shah Jahan’s love of beautiful and precious objects outshone even that of his father, as visitors noted. According to Edward Terry, Sir Thomas Roe’s chaplain, Shah Jahan was ‘the greatest and the richest master of precious stones that inhabits the whole earth’. The Portuguese Friar Manrique reported that he was so fascinated by gems that even when there appeared before him after a banquet twelve dancing girls decked out in ‘lascivious and suggestive dress, immodest behaviour and posturing’, the emperor hardly raised his eyes, but instead continued inspecting some fine jewels that had been brought to him by his brother-in-law, Asaf Khan.

It has recently emerged that after apparently damaging his eyes through excessive weeping over the death of Mumtaz Mahal, Shah Jahan even commissioned two pairs of bejewelled spectacles, one with lenses of diamonds, the other with lenses of emeralds.

It was at this point, presumably, that the other great Mughal gems went their separate ways. The Darya-i-Noor stayed in Persia. It was extracted from Shah Rukh, the grandson of Nader Shah, by especially gruesome torture. But long after Shah Rukh had told his captor, a sallow-cheeked former court eunuch named Agha Muhammad, the hiding place of the Darya-i-Noor and all his other crown jewels, the eunuch continued to torture him, asking him to reveal the hiding place of the one gem he did not have – the Koh-i-Noor. Frustrated in his designs, Agha Muhammad finally had Shah Rukh tied to a chair, and his head shaved. A crown of thick paste was built upon his bald pate. Then in a ghoulish coronation ceremony, reminiscent of an episode of Game of Thrones, Agha Muhammad personally poured a jug of molten lead into the crown.

Meanwhile, the Great Mughal diamond found its way into the open market in Turkestan, where it was eventually purchased by an Armenian trader who shipped it to the emerging world centre of the diamond market in Amsterdam. Here it was purchased by Count Orlov, a dashing Russian aristocrat and lover of Catherine the Great. On his return to St Petersburg, however, he discovered that he had been supplanted in Catherine’s bed by his rival Potemkin, and that in his absence his family had lost their position at court. He presented the gem to Catherine on her name day, full of hope – but while the diamond ended up in Catherine’s sceptre, he remained as far from her bedchamber as he had been since his return from his travels. Having gone massively into debt to buy the stone, he soon realised he had ruined himself, and the count ended his days raving in a Russian lunatic asylum. The gem is now on show, amid the other Russian crown jewels, in the Kremlin.

The Koh-i-Noor and its sister, the Timur Ruby, were both kept by Ahmad Khan Abdali on his person. He wore them both in an armlet in Kandahar when he took the throne to create what became in time a new country, and the home of the Koh-i-Noor for the next seventy years – Afghanistan.