It is always exciting to hear news about the akoya pearl industry in Vietnam, the elongated country that straddles akoya and South Sea pearl producing latitudes. With such a prime location, one would assume the pearl industry there would flourish. But the Tonga Bay is almost as famous for the rarely-discovered Melo pearl as it is for its pearl-culture industry.I ran across this story today, discussing Phu Quoc Island pearls and one large producer, Ho Phi Thuy. Phu Quoc is on the Western edge of Vietnam, in the Gulf of Thailand.
Ho Phi Thuy claims 1.5 million shells in the gulf, producing an annual harvest of 200kg. That may not be enough to make a large dent in the industry, but I found it interesting to note that nearly all of his pearls are exported to Japan. We might already be seeing his pearls in our run-of-the-mill Japanese akoya strands. I’ve heard Japan (and even Mikimoto) import akoya from Korea. It is no secret the Japanese have been buying akoya from China for years. And what has happened to the akoya produced in Australia. It stands to reason those have made their way to Japan too. It makes you wonder, what constitutes as a Japanese akoya strand these days?
According the same article, there are a lot of local sellers hawking pearls to locals and tourists alike. But none of them are the fine Vietnamese akoya. They are the crappy Chinese freshwater rejects ala Greenhills in the Philippines.
There are some who are selling Vietnamese akoya as Vietnamese akoya. Baggins of Los Angeles seems to be capitalizing on this new akoya genre. A few strands have even found their way to an online seller in Washington State.
I, for one, welcome the success of the Vietnamese. The akoya has fallen on some tough times recently with the diseases and price fluctuations in Japan, and the wrath of Mother Nature in China. It is about time a little luster happened upon the industry.
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8 comments:
Maloo's estimation of Vietnam's 2007 akoya output in the Modern Jeweler article seems to be an extreme overstatement. I wonder if someone accidentally added a zero or two. 800 kilo would produce around 30,000 strands of Vietnamese akoya. That is some serious volume.
I think the thickness of the Vietnamese akoya's skin is interesting. Anything over a millimeter is so rare these days, going as thick as 2 would put Vietnamese production ahead of even the best Japanese and Chinese.
Most medium/low quality Chinese pearls are thinly coated and I have noticed they peal and more often than not crack. Hopefully, the Vietnamese will fare better than the Chinese at producing fine quality akoya on a more consistent basis.
I think the same thing can be said about low-quality, short-culture Japanese akoya. It is not the provenance, it is the process. The problem with most Chinese akoya production is that there is a demand for short-culture material and farms that keep their mollusks in the water long enough to produce adequate goods face an increasing attrition rate, which often creates a lower-profit-yielding harvest or higher-quality pearls.
The only way to fix this is for consumers to start refusing these short-culture pearls, and wholesalers (in China, Japan, US, etc.) to stop buying them.
Japan started this problem by shortening the average growth time repeatedly over the last 50 years.
About 8 years ago, the coating on the chinese akoya was so poor, I was under the impression, they loosely strung neucli beads on silk then just slid them through an oyster like a sort of wash...LOL
Well that was a long time ago and the quality is certainly better. However, the fact remains the same that the best (and I mean the best of the best to ever come from Chinese waters) Chinese akoya quality cannot match the "Hanadama" level of Japanese akoya. Why can't the Chinese produce as high a quality as the Japanese..???
They can and they do. The volume is just extremely limited. In fact, the best of the Chinese is better than standard Hanadama because the surface is perfectly clean, the luster equally as high, but the nacre is much thicker. There simply isn't enough production of this caliber to make a difference, and most of it goes to Japan to be sold as Japanese anyway.
When China first cultured akoya pearls nearly 50 years ago, the average nacre thickness was 2 mm and on par with Japanese quality.
The sad truth is that akoyas in general and hanadama in particular have been developed as imitations of imitations because the "real pearl" people would not accept a bead-nucleated product and the people that did were comparing it to fakes because they have never seen an actual pearl. That's why akoyas have to be treated so much in so many different ways just so that they look like a perfect strand of fakes, which they essentially are. Imagine you took a cubic zirconia stone and covered it with red-dyed white corundum. Would any gemologist in the world call that a genuine cultured ruby worth as much as a medium grade natural? Heck, no! So why this double standard?? Nobody has explained that to me yet. That is nobody except myself - and the GIA pearl course endowments by Mikimoto, Paspaley, Autore, Jewelmer, and Perles de Tahiti figured prominently in my explanation.
This article is untrue,1.5 million shell ? even the photo used in this article is from my pearl farm in Phu Quoc and the shell in the panel are Maxima not Akoya.
Phu Quoc Pearls Vietnam Ltd
www.treasuresfromthedeep.com
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