Kohinoor: The Story of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond

by William Dalrymple

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.