Meet The ‘Star Of Pure Land,’ A 3563-Carat Sapphire, At $300 Million

Three thousand five hundred and sixty-tree carats, a measurement of weight and in a certain way a measurement of the size of gemstones, translates as 1.57 pounds, which is just one of the several reason why the ultra-rare Sri Lankan “natural purple” star sapphire, certified on January 17 in Colombo by the American Gemological Institute as the world’s largest of its kind, has just been valued at a curiously flat but still stratospheric $300 million. With no shred of irony, the stone has been named the “Star of Pure Land.” Its estimate rests first on its size — meaning on the extreme rarity of a stone “of” that size — but the value lies in almost equal measure upon its quality.

That elusive value/quality equation works like this: So-called “star” sapphires of the highest natural quality carry what are called needles of the element rutile within them, which refracts light differently within the stone, creating — in this case — the famous six-pointed star reflection on the stone’s surface when illuminated. Ideally, sapphires’ stars are thought best when clearly , geometrically delineated, unsullied by contaminant minerals or whorls within the molecular grain of the stone. With its reported natural clarity, the Star of Pure Land has that.

Additionally, its purple (not blue) color, as well as its sheer mass at that level of purity means that in this stone’s formation, the conditions of the earth’s crust at that specific point under Sri Lanka were set up perfectly to generate not a tiny, perfect, thing, but a great big perfect thing. Hence the notional $300 million tag. Pictured top, the Star of Pure Land, yet to be abraded or polished.

The Star of Pure Land is rare in this way: the immense geologic pressures in the crust that forge sapphires and then bring them up to mine-able depth occur over many millennia. A distant cousin of the Pure Land, the famous 563.35-carat blue “Star of India” held by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, has been estimated at some 2 billion years old.

The Star of India’s intensely curlicued provenance and bumptious post-sale 20th-century history is a Baedeker for all who might aspire to purchase the Pure Land, should it ever be formally or publicly offered for sale. Belle Epoque financier J.P. Morgan commissioned the Tiffany gem expert George Kunz to build him a collection of rare jewels for the Paris Exposition of 1900. Among other baubles, Kunz returned from the extended hunt with The Star of India, dropping it off in London to be cut and polished en cabochon, which is to say, abraded rather than faceted down to an elliptical shape. The Star of India exhibits the classic six-pointed star with extreme clarity across its gray-blue surface.

Toward the end of his life, Morgan donated the entire collection to the Museum of Natural History, and there, we can be forgiven for thinking, the jewel would rest.

Unfortunately for the museum, but standing as fair caveat emptor to the owners of all extraordinary gemstones, the Star of India was stolen in October 1964 by the renowned thief and convicted murderer Jack Roland “Murph the Surf” Murphy and his gang, who had managed, during working hours, to case the museum and jimmy a neglected bathroom window open. That night they went to work. The Star of India had been housed in a case rigged with an alarm whose battery was dead.

In the haul, in cases with no alarms, apparently, were the famous “Eagle” diamond and the “Delong Ruby,” which made the job the largest gem theft in American history. Murph the Surf and two of his boys were collared two days later, professing that the goods were gone. However, after being sweated in custody for two-plus months and seeking a modicum of clemency for his upcoming legal proceeding, Murphy finally came to Jesus and led the authorities to a bus locker in Miami, where the Star of India and a few other jewels from the heist had been stashed.

Predictably, in 1975, a scant decade after the heist, Hollywood immortalised the theft by filming a fine blockbuster, starring a buff Robert Conrad as the Surf alongside a lissome Donna Mills, the aptly entitled Live A Little, Steal A Lot. The Surf, literally named for his sporting hobby of surfing, and whose character in the movie was written to spend a good deal of time beachside in his bathing suit, became, perhaps predictably, a minister and died in “retirement” in 2020, at 83, in Crystal River, Florida.

At one-and-a-half pounds, or about seven times the size of the Star of India, the Star of Pure Land remains an essentially un-wearable object, and one that may not even be able to be shown, with perhaps the exception of its consortium of owners staging a well-catered drinks party in the fortified room around its presumably equally tactical case. The stone was discovered, we do know, in Sri Lanka’s southern back country near the town of Ratnapura — Sanskrit for “city of gems” — a district capital about sixty miles inland from Colombo and the shores of the Laccadive Sea.

Pictured below, the 1400-carat Star of Adam, so named by its Sri Lankan owner to celebrate the local Islamic belief that Adam, upon leaving Eden, settled in Sri Lanka. Geologically speaking an extremely close neighbor to the Star of Pure Land, the Star of Adam was discovered near Ratnapura a decade ago.

It should be noted that, in the larger public sense of the markets for the world’s rare gems, the Star of Pure Land’s consortium of owners has chosen to remain anonymous. Their moves have been professionally ultra-discreet; the announcement of the Pure Land gemological certification arrives some two-plus years after the gem’s 2023 discovery.

The floated $300 million estimate doesn’t indicate a sale, nor does it imply that a sale will not occur. It is what it is, but no more than that: Yes, definitely a very large number indicating a certain metric, plus or minus tens of millions according to the market’s seismic tremors at this or that moment. But that gargantuan swing, dozens of millions wide at some theoretical future moment of sale, also means that the stone’s actual market value remains oddly indeterminate.

Said another way, it’s delightful to know out of Colombo that this is really the world’s largest and one of the finest purple sapphires, and it is surely very beautiful, but the $300 million is quite a squishy trial balloon. Whatever the ultimate fate of the Star of Pure Land, we can say that operating mechanism of the market for fine gemstones stands in blunt contrast to the prized scientific qualities it demands of the best stones in it: It has no clarity at all.