Fred Ward on round Chinese freshwaters

[jshepherd]

Pearls are also used as bead, but only in small quantity and in very few farmers. One company has 2 patents in this area and began to test this method 10 years ago. The main cause is that normal beads are more cheap than pearls.

This is different than the information I have heard.

When I went to China with D. Fiske from GIA researching the freshwater pearls course, "pearl nucleus" was one of our standard questions. We had a list of questions for every person in the industry we interviewed which included several farmers, the CEOs of Grace and Pure, and a lot of technicians. Everyone responded the same. Farmers had experimented with pearl nuclei but the results were poor. The nuclei were not perfectly spherical nor smooth so the resulting pearls were of poor quality. The pearls could not be shaped into perfect nuclei either. We confirmed this with Arthur Wong while visiting his nuclei factory in Guangzhou.

I had also heard the stories about farmers who use pearls as nuclei. But I believe they are just stories. There are so many of them in China, I have found. Facts and rumors are told with the same certainty there. Every piece of information D. Fiske recorded, he verified it with two other sources before considering it a fact.

 

[Monty Hall]

Facts and rumors are told with the same certainty there.

Nice! That must make your job real easy!!!

I would imagine that rumor mills amid an industry in perpetual high-speed evolution quickly would render publications obsolete.

Jeremy, we need an online journal, _Chinese Pearls Now_, emphasizing the "Now". However, the Chinese tendency to "die with the recipe" might make it a rumors-only publication.

I got that "die with the recipe" line from my grandmother. Apparently, there had been a famous Chinese take-out in '40s downtown Honolulu (forgotten the name), frequented by our extended family, friends of our extended family, and their extended families as well. When the owner/chef died, he took all of his recipes to the grave with him. Not even his children could continue with the same dishes.

Artistic pride to the max!!!
CarolK