Visiting pearl suppliers in China

December of 2011, I went back to China spend short vacation with my families from France. I managed to take one day’s trip to visit my suppliers’ pearl lakes because they locate just in my hometown-Hunan province a fast developing pearl cultivation base where produces about 50% pearls in China. Certainly from internet and books relates to Pearls or cultured pearls we can learn big deal of knowledge, but I always like visiting my suppliers to understand more of the pearl producing industry by actually seeing how they organize their works, further more to understand profound and practical experience from my suppliers on pearl cultivation and managing to select good pearls.

Photos above present the pearl cultivation lake which belongs to one of my suppliers, as well his villa with impressive wooden architecture designed by my supplier himself besides a garden with wild elephant statue. From here the photo of pearl lake, you can see on the surface of the lake, there are many plastic bottles. Under each bottle hangs a mother- pearl shell. The reason for this is because when pearl nacre grows inside of their mother-shell they need oxygen and sunlight just like human beings. This way also provides easy way for checking pearls’ growing status from time to time during average 3~5 years. Important factors relating to the quality of pearls starting from the beginning – inserting tissue piece to mussel to later on maintaining good cultivation environment in the lake( such as quality and fluidity of water etc.), and particularly many methods were created to make sure sufficient nutrition in the lake for cultivation. Global, high quality pearls are produced through expertise experiences to provide good technics and methodologies, investing time, cost and energy plus a lot of patience.