Wei-Ying hooked me up with two of his students, Guirong and Xinjing, who took me to the Pearl Market on Sunday morning to get some pearls for MK and Laura. It’s an experience… pearls are on the 3rd and 4th floor. The 3rd floor is a zoo, and it’s where the lesser-quality pearls are. You eventually find your way to the 4th floor (we were invited by one of the 3rd floor shops, and had to go up a sketchy stairway to get it). Then, it’s relatively quiet and the shops look like, well, shops. We went through a bunch, and it turns out Xinjing is a bit of a shark in negotiating for jewelry. Pearls by Amy was our second stop, and after a bit we returned as they appeared to have the best quality stuff. I let Xinjing negotiate… our plan was to get the price down at Amy’s, and if they wouldn’t hit what we wanted go somewhere else (we saw all the places on the side w/ Pearls by Amy, but didn’t go to the other side yet… some nicer looking places were there… Yonghong and Fanghua). I’ll not post the price quite yet, as I don’t want MK to know until we have the appraisal! but we got a good deal - Xinjing, a shy, demure female Chinese student is a total shark! It was impressive to see her in action. We picked up 2 21″ strands of 10mm pearls + matching earrings (8mm), one white and one black. Note: normally, you get 18″ strands, and that 18″ includes the clasp.

Now, you might be asking if they’re fake… after all, most everything else in China is. However, these are real. The deal is that the Chinese are using freshwater culturing and doing it at mass scale, so the price is very, very low. Check out this article from Nova.

This entry was posted 3 years, 1 month ago on Sunday, May 22nd, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Trips and Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.