Place · diamond mining region · India

Kollur / Golconda diamond fields

Function

Trade & production

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

16.700, 80.000 (approximate)

Worth knowing

Before Brazil in the 1720s, effectively every large diamond in the world came from these gravels. The Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent, the Darya-i-Noor and the Orlov are all Golconda stones from a stretch of the Krishna a few kilometres long.

Connections (7)

• Power passed toKarnal

  The Koh-i-Noor came out of the alluvial workings of the Krishna valley, probably at Kollur, entered the Mughal treasury from Golconda, and left India with Nadir Shah in 1739 after Karnal. It then went to his Afghan general Ahmad Shah Durrani, to Ranjit Singh at Lahore in 1813, and to Queen Victoria in 1850. Every stage of that route is a conquest or an extraction, which is why the question of returning it has no clean answer.

• Trade routeWarangal Fort

  The Kakatiyas held the country the diamond gravels lay in, and the stones from the Krishna valley went out through their port at Motupalli under the charter that guaranteed foreign merchants their goods. When Delhi took Warangal in 1323 the treasury went north, and the Koh-i-Noor is usually said to enter the record at that point — so the fields, the port and the fort are one economic system and it was dismantled in a single campaign.

• Object journeyTower of London

  The Koh-i-Noor originated in the Golconda diamond fields along the Krishna River and, after passing through the Kakatiya sphere, Delhi, Agra, Nadir Shah, the Durrani rulers and Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore, ultimately reached London in 1850. This edge marks the Koh-i-Noor journey from its Indian provenance to the Tower of London.

• Trade routeMotupalli

  The diamonds Polo heard of at Mutfili came from the Krishna valley gravels around Kollur, a few days inland, which were the only significant source of large diamonds anywhere in the world before Brazil in the 1720s. The stones moved down to this coast and out through Coromandel shipping; four centuries later Tavernier took the same route inland to see the workings, and the Koh-i-Noor, the Hope, the Regent and the Orlov all came out of these same gravels.

• Trade routeDamascus

  The Krishna valley gravels supplied the world's large diamonds and the Deccan also supplied the crucible steel that Damascus forged into blades — two commodities from the same plateau moving west along the same routes through the Coromandel ports and Persia. Tavernier travelled for both, and his Travels is the fullest account of either trade. Both ended within a few decades of each other in the eighteenth century, one to Brazilian competition and one to the exhaustion of a particular ore.

• Craft tradition ofGolconda

  Kollur and the other Krishna-valley gravels were the source; Golconda was the market, the cutting centre and the name. Tavernier bought here on six voyages and his 1676 account is the main description of how the fields were worked, under lease from the Qutb Shahi state with a levy on every stone above a certain weight. Both the mines and the sultanate were finished within a century.

• Trade routeParis

  Paris and the Kollur gravels are the two ends of one trade: Tavernier bought at the mine and the Golconda market and sold at the French court, and the stones that crossed that distance include the Hope and the Great Mogul. The route ran Isfahan, Surat, Golconda and back, and he did it six times over nearly forty years.

On these journeys

• The Deccan Sultanates
• Journey of Koh-i-Noor
• Jean-Baptiste Tavernier — six voyages for stones (1630–68)

Sources

Tavernier, Travels in India

• Wikipedia