This expedition, even if it was privately conducted during their holidays and financed by the authors, was supported by the Gubelin Gem Lab located in Lucerne, Switzerland, where two members of the Mergui expedition: Christian Dunaigre and myself were working as gemologists at the time of the expedition.

Abstract: This web page presents the field trip Vincent Pardieu and Christian Dunaigre, gemologists at the Gubelin Gem Lab, Lucerne Switzerland, had with Kham Vannaxay (Sofragem, Bangkok, Thailand) to the Myanmar Orient Pearl Co Ltd south sea pearl farming operation in the Mergui archipelago from Dec 08 to Dec 13, 2007. A report about this visit was published in Jewelry News Asia March 2008 issue.

1) Introduction: A rapid presentation of the Mergui archipelago, its importance for the cultured pearl industry and a presentation of some key people I want to give some very special thanks to have helped us to visit Mergui.

2 ) From Mergui to Ravenshaw island, a cruise through the Mergui archipelago: From Mergui harbor we had a 10 hours cruise on the Mergui archipelago, a remote and difficult to access tropical archipelago located in the south of Burma on the Andaman sea. It was a wonderful visit of one of the last archipelago still out of range of any tourism industry. We passed numerous beautiful Burmese fishing villages with their wooden houses and golden stupas, passed the remote "marble islands" where bird nests are collected. Sailing in the archipelago from one pearl farm to another gave us also the chance to meet the sea gypsies of Mergui: The Salon people living a nomadic life of their small boats.

3 ) A visit to the Orient Pearl Co Ltd pearl farm around Ravenshaw island.
In Formerly known as "Myanmar Ocean Pearl Co Ltd" the "Myanmar Orient Pearl Co Ltd" is a private company which is working at Ravenshaw island since 1993. Its owner, U Myint Lwin was first involved in fishing before to become one of the main pearl producer in Mergui. "Myanmar Orient Pearl Co Ltd" was presented to us as the second most important pearl farm in Mergui after Tasaki, a Japanese company and Myanmar Pearl Enterprises, the Burmese state owned company. In 1999 Kham Vannaxay visited already the operation with Ted Themelis. A report was published later by Ted Themelis. It was interesting to see that pearl farming in Mergui changed dramatically since that visit,

4) Special Thanks, interesting links and bibliography.

We invite you to follow our winter 2007 field trip to the mergui pearl farms using the potential given by the free software Google Earth. Just download and install the software, then using our links you can get a better idea about the mining areas we visited or those for which information is available in the gemological literature. We recommend you to select the "terrain" option (down left in the "layer" booklet) in order to enjoy a 3D visit.

We had our first contact with Mergui "Cultured South Sea" pearls at the Mergui airport few minutes after our arrival. There we were welcomed by some fiends of U Myint Lwin the owner of Orient pearl Co ltd.
One of them, U Maung Win, immediately got all our attention: This strong, friendly looking man with his proud moustache, was wearing a beautiful white pearl as a ring..
I've to say that it was the first time I saw a man with such a pearl ring and we were surprised, very positively surprised in fact.. It was a beautiful ring!
Mergui people tare told us that pearl was worn as a symbol for peace, but more officially at the Yangon Emporium gem museum, in the traditional Burmese "Nine Esteemed Gems", pearls are told to be symbols of pride, glory and grace.

Our team was lead by U Myint Lwin, a Burmese marine biologist turned into a private entrepreneur involved is fisheries and more recently into pearl farming .
He is the owner of "Orient Pearl Co Ltd", a man in love with his boats, and his pearls.

He amazed us as he was never missing an opportunity to sail or to drive giving me the feeling that I was not the only "travel addicted" person around..

Thanks to him we were about to discover this remote archipelago, perhaps the last "tourist free" tropical archipelago on Earth.

To take us around in the Mergui archipelago, U Myint Lwin asked one of his friends U Tin Nge to join our expedition.

U Tin Nge has spent his life on the bay working with Burmese, Thais and with the Salons, the Mergui "Sea Gypsies".
For our pleasure and his pride he was also wearing a golden "South Sea Pearl" as a ring. A beautiful pearl coming from the "Orient Pearl" farm: Our destination!

We left Mergui Harbor on the "Ashe Tai Palei", the Orient Pearl. Within few minutes we were sailing in the middle of tens of other boats along the beautiful old city crowned with giant trees, mysterious monasteries and golden stupas..

Video courtesy Christian Dunaigre.

Arriving in Thal Chaung Yua with the "Orient Pearl"...

Video courtesy Christian Dunaigre.

Life in Thal Chaung Yua was appearing very colorful and peaceful. Down the Pagoda, build on the hill, was the village school with possibly 200 lively children. The village main activity was fishing, and betel production.

The main street was busy with people coming in and out carrying goods and food. The arrival of three foreigners in the village was a small event. People were nice and smiling, young Burmese speaking English came to us to practice a little bit while mother were bringing to us their children visibly in order to show them some leaving foreigners.. We had then some great photograph opportunities..

We had our lunch at U Tin Nge sister house. This strong, very charismatic women was a great cook and our lunch turned into a real feast we took with the owner of the Bird nest license at marble island. A great occasion to ask him some questions and get his approval to visit the island and its precious hidden cave.

"Bird nests" from the "Marble islands": After our visit to Thal Chaung Yua we left to "Nyet Tiak Kyunn", the Marble islands, in order to visit the cave were the famous bird nests are found. The birds, in fact swallows, build these nests each year with their saliva and they are a traditional delicacy for Chinese people. Mergui archipelago is no the only place in the world were these nests are collected, I was even told recently that some people in Chanthaburi, Thailand stopped his gem burning business to start a bird nest business as he found a way to attract the birds in his house..
We were told that the Marble island bird nest production was estimated around 40kg per year, a drop compared to the several hundreds of kilos we were told to be produced each year in other areas of the archipelago in Mali island and even in some houses of Mergui city. But marble islands is probably one of the most scenic area of the archipelago for this production, with its vertical white marble cliff covered with a scare vegetation they are a fine example of karstic relief as we can found in Halong Bay in Vietnam or in Phan Nga bay in Thailand:
In Marble Islands, the cave where the swallows build their nests is located in a lagoon which can be accessed only at low tide though a deep cave connecting the sea to the lagoon. The bird nests are collected in the deep cave using some bamboo ladders in March first as soon as the birds have build their nests and then in June when the youngsters have left their nests.
As we visited the area in December, we could not see any bird nest, just the empty guardian hut at the entrance of the cave and some piles of Bamboo waiting in the cave for the next spring and a new harvest. Nevertheless we were lucky to see during our expedition in Burma how the bird nests are cleaned using tweezers of any trace of dirt.. Here are some photos and short movies you might found interesting about this expedition:

Here is a short video taken while we were approaching the marble islands where the bird nest are found in a remote lagoon..

Video Vincent Pardieu.

The "Mokens", the Mergui Sea Gypsies: During our visit of the different pearl farming sites around Ravenshaw island, we were lucky to meet two times the famous "sea gypsies" of Mergui: The "Salons" people as the Burmese call them or the "Moken" people as they are named in many English speaking publications.
For centuries they were outcasts, living a nomadic existence in the sea they were possibly the oldest inhabitants of the region. Thanks to U Tin Nge who can speak their language we were able to share with them some precious minutes and some fresh sea food..

The first family we met was drying the result of their fishing on the beach, the family was composed of a man, his wife and their children. He bought from them some dry sea food for our diner.

Moken people were known in the past to be excellent divers.
For centuries they were living on the sea on the archipelago, fishing and sometimes probably diving to collect oysters to get their natural pearls.
It is not clear if they were working as free men or forced to dive by local leaders..
But it seems that they have after many centuries adapted to the sea (Gilsen, 2003).

During our expedition we did not heard about Moken people still diving to collect natural pearls, but many Moken worked as professional pearl divers during the last 120 years.

The second group was composed of several men, women and children. Most women from this group were wearing some Burmese style gold and ruby jewelry. They were looking more wealthy than the first group and were taking their lunch, composed of rice and fried squid on their boat. Several small pirogues used for fishing were attached to the main boat. Later we will find again two of the old ladies of this groups fishing squids on their tiny pirogue. A great occasion for us to taste some squid sashimi..

Here is another short video where two old sea gypsy ladies were fishing squids. They were members of the second group we met few hours before. U Tin Nge bought some squids from them that few minutes later were turned into yummy sashimi..

Video courtesy Christian Dunaigre.

Part 3: A visit to the "Orient Pearl Co Ltd" farm around Ravenshaw island:

An introduction to the history of Pearling in Mergui:
Pearling was a traditional activity in Mergui for centuries as different pearl producing oysters species are found in Mergui including the Pinctada Maxima and the Pteria Pinguin. According to B.Bronson in "Pearls without price", 2000:

" The other great pearling area of ancient times lay in Southeast Asia, the Mergui Archipelago of Burma-Myanmar, the Leizhou Peninsula of southern China, and the Sulu Islands of the southern Philippines. With long histories of reasonably continuous use, these supplied pearls to markets that lay outside the sphere of the Bombay-centered commercial system that controlled the bulk of the world's pearl trade. Mergui and Sulu, as well as occasionally exploited pearl beds in eastern Indonesia, produced a different kind of pearls, golden ones from the very large pearl oyster species Pinctada Maxima. The pearls were much larger than those from Sri Lanka and the Persian Gulf, and are exceptionally beautiful in modern eyes: even now, insiders claim that the finest cultured pearls in the world come from Mergui. Early pearl buyers may not have agreed, however. Southeast Asian pearls were not a major factor in the world's jewelry trade. The Chinese knew about them but obviously preferred pearls from places further west, and the Indians and Persians may not even have known that Southeast Asian pearls existed."

According to "The history of industrial marine fisheries in Southeast Asia" by G.R. Morgan and D.J.Staples:

"In 1839 Augustus Siebe developed diving gear which was eagerly adapted by companies with sufficient capital to purchase the necessary equipment. The addition of diving equipment not only enabled divers to reach greater depths (up to approximately 54m) than had previously been possible with free-diving, but also to increase the proportion of the year in which it was possible to collect oysters from three to nine months. The development also enabled stocks in deeper waters to be exploited and, by the late 1800s, areas in the Aru islands, the Mergui Archipelago and the Sulu Archipelago were being fished. Faced with the high costs of the pearling operations, pearlers generally adopted the strategy of extracting as much as possible is quickly as possible and then moving on to another oyster bed. This strategy was adopted in all three of the main pearling areas.
The first area where the diving equipment resulted in an increase in yield was in the Mergui Archipelago where, according to an official report by Rudmore Brown and Simpson in 1907, the was no systematic pearling in the archipelago before 1891 when the attention of the government was drawn to these banks by a Queensland pearler [presumably from the Torres Straits]. To Manage this fishery, the government of Burma immediately introduced a “block system” whereby the government auctioned the rights to collect pearl oysters in five “block” covering the richest pearling grounds. As a result of this system the mentality was adopted that it was imperative to extract as much pearl shell as possible during the year as the same company would not necessary secure the same block the following year. Official figures indicate the yield rose dramatically from 26 tons in 1891/92 to 340 tons in 1894/95, leading to the emergence of Mergui a a boomtown. By 1900/01 the yield had fallen to 66 tonnes and the government abolished the block system and replaced it by a system under which pearlers bought a license for each pump they used.
During this period the accepted view was that there was little danger of overexploitation of the Mergui pearl bed as the beds were continually restocked by the offspring produced by oysters in deeper waters beyond the reach of the divers. It was argued that there was a natural balance between the number of divers and the quantity of shell available, as yields fell, divers would leave and the stock would recover. As a result it was concluded that the was no need for any sort of regulation of the Mergui pearl fishery."

At that times pearls were recovered from wild oysters .It is only during the 1950's that pearl farming was introduced and developed in Mergui by Japanese cultured pearl producers: Tint Tun in his article "Myanmar pearling: past, present and future" report the following in 1998:
"Pearl culture in Myanmar commenced in 1954 after the establishment of a private Japanese—Myanmar joint-venture farm. The joint-venture farm, Burma Pearl Fishing and Culture Syndicate, started pearl cultivation at Domel Island. Then, about two years later, they moved from Domel to Sir J. Malcolm Island (later, it was named Pearl Island) which has more favorable conditions for pearl culture.. Divers equipped with the most modern diving gear of that time collected pearl oysters, and joint-venture could successfully cultivate Myanmar pearls.
The Revolutionary Government nationalized the joint-venture farm on 16 August 1963. After nationalization, the Syndicate, People’s Pearl and Fishery Board tried to produce pearls using Myanmar citizens. At that time, the pearl culture branch was temporarily attached to the Salt Industry, and it was finally transformed into a separate enterprise in 1989, Myanmar Pearl Enterprise (MPE), under the Ministry of Mines.
In 1988, Myanmar reformed its socialist economy to become a market-oriented economy, and a total of three joint-venture companies, both local and foreign, are now undertaking Myanmar white South Sea Pearls production. Pearl Island became the main station, as pearl cultivation has been expanding to some other islands of Myeik (Mergui) archipelago, conducted by state-run and joint-venture pearl companies. The significant fact is that the People’s Pearl and Fishery Corporation or Myanmar Pearl Enterprise (MPE) was the one and only pearl producer in Myanmar since 1963. Foreign interest and investments have been flowing into various sectors of the Myanmar economy since Myanmar reformed its xenophobic system to become a market-oriented economy. Both local and overseas (Japanese, Australian, Tahitian, Thai) companies have made enquiries to invest in Myanmar for South Sea pearl cultivation. With the covetous glances from investors, the pearl culture section is also expanding by forming joint ventures between MPE and both local and overseas companies. Nowadays a total of four companies, the state-run MPE and three joint ventures, are undertaking Myanmar cultured pearl production. MPE is the main partner in all those three joint ventures: two foreign and one local. The first venture was established in August 1993, with Niino International Corporation of Japan forming the Myanmar —Niino Joint Venture Company Limited. In January 1994, the second joint venture was formed between Ocean Pearl Company Ltd of Myanmar and MPE. The latest partner is a giant Japanese pearl company, Tasaki Shinju, with which they formed a joint venture in March 1997. Except at Tasaki, seeding is done by Myanmar technicians at all companies. At first, the Myanmar—Niino joint venture used a Japanese technician, but later Myanmar technicians for MPE have been seeding there on loan. A proposal to form a joint venture between MPE and an Australian company, Atlantic, was submitted to the Ministry and Commission concerned. This latest joint venture is waiting to take part in Myanmar cultured-pearl production."

Here is a short video taken at sunrise over the bay at Ravenshaw island. The area was very peaceful. Numerous boats were waiting near the "long lines" visible thanks to their buoys.

Video: Vincent Pardieu.