Previous Year Question

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (1605–1689 CE) was a seventeenth-century French traveller and professional gem merchant. He made several journeys to Persia and India and had a particular commercial interest in diamonds and other precious stones. Because of this professional experience, his description of Indian diamond mining is substantially more detailed than the general accounts of most other travellers.

The strongest evidence comes from Tavernier's own travel account, Les Six Voyages (1676), translated into English as Travels in India. One of its chapters dealing with diamonds is explicitly titled “Of Diamonds, and the Mines and Rivers where they are found.” Tavernier himself states that diamonds were the commodity in which he dealt most extensively and that, in order to acquire complete knowledge, he personally visited four diamond mines and one river where diamonds were found. He described mines such as Raolconda and Gani/Coulour (Kollur), the conditions in which diamonds occurred and aspects of their extraction.