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Akoya Cultured Pearls with Nucleus

In 1958, Professor Xiong Daren, who worked at the Fisheries Institute in the south Chinese city of Zhanjiang, started the first official pilot project for the production of pearls with a nucleus with Pinctada chemnitzii( Philippi, 1849) on behalf of the government. During the early nineteen sixties, the experiment led to the regular production of cultured pearls of very good quality. By the end of the sixties, a ton had already been produced. The whole production was sold to Japan and was re-exported to the world market as Japanese cultured pearls. The same was true for the high quality production of the nineteen seventies (a total of about 5 tons) and the nineteen eighties ( a total of about 10 tons), these figures are personal reports from Chinese scientists and farmers in Novemer 1997.

Professor Xiong, who worked in Japan as a marine biologist before World War II, where he probably became familiar with the Japanese Akoya pearl culture methods. It seems that the conducted his first experiment in South China before World War II, in which he attemped to combine the century old Chinese method with the Japanese method. The project was kept secret and as hidden from the eyes of the Japanese occupying forces.

During the Japanese era (1931 to 1945), the Chinese were strictly forbidden to produce cultured pearls or to attempt production. The group around Professor Xiong probably started work again directly after the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949.

The first four official farms were established in the Bay of Haikang on Leizhou Peninsula in the South China Sea, near the city of Zhanjiang, China. They used Pinctada chemnitzii( Philippi, 1849) , the growth period lasted for about two years. The high growth period lasted for about two years. The high growth rate of 1.1mm to 1.2mm per year resulted in a nacre thickness of over 2mm that from today's point of view must be considered extraordinary. The shape of the pearls was nearly perfectly round, and sizes averaged between 6mm to 8mm, while the maximum size was 9mm. The nuclei were made of Chinese freshwater mother-of-pearl.

Over the following years, more farms were built on Hainan Island in South China and along the shores of the mainland; they soon stretched to the west as far as Huidong near the Vietnamese border.

The international market did not become aware of China as a producer of marine cultured pearls with a nucleus until 1992. The Japanese Yakushi Pearl company from Osaka presented the first 10,000 strings in February 1992 and acted on behalf of the state-owned” China Pearl, Diamond, Gem and Jewellery Import and Export Corporation”. The pearls were quickly seen as a new, not yet completely perfect development from China. The worldwide pearl industry had been unaware for more than three decades that a part of the Japanese Akoya production had in reality come from China. The Chinese distinctly larger quantities pearl production of early nineteen nineties was different from earlier production.