Turquoise Natural Green, ten handcut tubular beads, and an old native cut Coral as centre-bead, in a Silver cable link chain necklace, the eleven gemstone bead segments securely integrated into the chain necklace with hand-worked Silver twist wire, labour-intensive work created in Sydney.
The above “Turquoise Natural Green” has its origin in one of the more than a dozen working Turquoise mines of China, where Turquoise has always been a much appreciated gemstone, used not only in jewellery but in ornamental carvings and intricate inlay work. These ten beads came in a packet of Turquoise beads, all handcut in the above tubular form, almost certainly all from the same Turquoise mine; most of the packet’s Turquoise gemstones were of a lighter, more normal Turquoise blue, with only twenty or so in the interesting earthy greens of the above, and only ten drilled with holes big enough to handle the thickness of Silver wire needed for the strength and integrity of the connections: hence the above one-off necklace.
The centre Coral is an old native cut gemstone of Sth India, of a good saturated orange-red. Of Mediterranean origin, it would have been imported into Sth India in branch form around the 1950s or earlier.