Abstract: This web page presents the fieldtrip done by AIGS gemological laboratory director Vincent Pardieu to Afghanistan. This fieldtrip was part of the expedition supported by AIGS and Gubelin gemological laboratories with the help of ICA to the Western Hymalaya range during summer 2006. Along with him during this expedition was Guillaume Soubiraa, a Madagascar based French gemologist, who studied gemology at AIGS Bangkok in 2006.
During this expedition Pakistan was our main fieldtrip base. We arrived in Islamabad and after few days preparing visas and plane tickets, we left for Namak Mandi, Peshawar's gem market which visit is very informative about the area mining activity. At Namak Mandi we could see rubies from Jagdalek, Tajikistan and to a less extend from Kashmir, then regarding emeralds we could see many stones from Panjshir, Swat and from the new mining area in Davdar, China. From Peshawar we visited the Mingora emerald mine in Swat valley before leaving to Afghanistan and Tajikistan. After our return in Pakistan through Peshawar, we returned to Islamabad to fly to Kashgar in China. Then we took the Karakoram highway driving south to enter again Pakistan at Sost on the Kunjerab pass. After our return in Islamabad we went to Muzafarabad to explore the Neelam valley and reach the Kashmir ruby mine at Nangimali. We were able to visit these mines, witness the miners work and study the production.

Introduction: Pakistan is both a gemstone producer, the regional trading center for gemstones from Central Asia and also a jewelry cutting and manufactory center. Most of the good cut and the jewelry manufacturing was told us to be done in Karachi while most of the gemstone trading is performed in Namak Mandi gem market in Peshawar. If we did not visit Karachi we have spent one week in Peshawar to see what was available regarding rubies and emeralds. Pakistan was during this two months field trip our main base.
After arriving from Bangkok to Islamabad, we went to visit Peshawar and the emerald Swat deposit. Then we left by road to Afghanistan and Tajikistan and came back one month after to Peshawar after a long drive through the Kaiber pass from the Jagdalek ruby mines. We took then a flight to Kashgar in Chinese Xin Jiang to visit the emerald mines and came back to Pakistan by bus driving over the Kunjerab pass to Gilgit and then continuing to Islamabad all along the Karakoram highway with a 30 hours drive. Then we left to Muzafarabad and the neelam valley to reach Kel and the famous Kashmir ruby mines at Nangimali. A difficult trip as the area was still suffering of the consequences of the terrible earthquake that killed over 90.000 people in the area in September 2005.

We invite you to follow our Summer 2006 fieldtrip to Pakistan and Central Asia using the potential given by the free software Google Earth. Just download and install it, then using our placemarks you can get a better idea about the mining areas we visited or those for which information is available in the gemological litterature. We recommend you to select the "terrain" option (down left in the "layer" booklet) in order to enjoy a 3D visit.

Here is a modified satelite map created from Google Earth on which you can discover the region around Peshawar and the different mining areas in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and China we visited in summer 2006:

A) The Namak Mandi, Gem market, Peshawar: Few minutes after our arrival in Peshawar we were on the way to the Namak Mandi gemstone market. This small area composed around two tiny streets is Central Asia main gemstone trading center. It is a interesting and pictoral place in which streets and coffee shops are full of Afghan looking men. Namak Mandi is one of this place were people are quietly busy drinking tea, walking in the street, speaking to each other.

As in many trading center one of the best way to look at stones there is to use a local as broker, sit in his office and wait actively for the stones to come. During the week we stayed in Namak Mandi we focussed on rubies and emeralds and had sadly no real time to look at the other stones present in the market. But we saw rapidly some attractive tourmalines, topaz, aquamarine and also some interesting collector stones.

As expected rubies were plentiful. Most of the stones were the traditional pinkish to red rubies coming from Jagdalek in Afghanistan and very attractive pinkish to red stone from the new deposit in the Murgap area in Tajikistan.
We saw also some few purplish and dark red stones which were told us to origin from the Batakundi area and very few bright red small stones from the Nangimali deposit in Kashmir. But these stones were very rare in the market. Despite our effort we were surprised not to be able to see any ruby from the Hunza valley. Globally cut stones were more easy to see than rough stones as the local dealers prefer usually to cut the stones before to show them. On the other hand fine crystals and mineral specimens were easily available from specialized dealers. Surprisingly we did not saw any synthetics in the market, possibly as our broker did a good work selecting the dealers and the parcels which were presented to us. The only place in Pakistan we were presented some synthetic was at a dealer office in Islamabad when a dealer presented us some interesting stones that were presented to him as rubies in matrix and which turned finally to be synthetic stones glued to some white matrix looking compound.

Nevertheless, Namak mandi market was not without tricks as we saw several parcels of suspicious pinkish low quality rubies which were presented to us several times by the same young dealers as Jagdalek stones. As the parcels were obviously coming from Andilamena in Madagascar and were a mixture of heated and lead glass filled stones we rapidly nicknamed the two young dealers: "Jagdamene" and "Madaganistan"...

Emeralds: Regarding emeralds, Namak Mandi market is also a fascinating place as the pockets of the dealers are there full of emeralds from Panjshir, Swat, Lakhman, Gilgit and also from the new mine located near the village of Davdar in Chinese Xin Jiang. Most of the Panjshir and all the Swat emeralds we saw were small stones and largest attractive emerald we saw was told us to be from Chinese origin. Most of the Swat material was the traditional small size stones with strong color zoning and high saturation which are known to come from the area. The Panjshir stones were commonly larger than the Swat emeralds, they had for the best quality an attractive luster in a wide range of green from yellowish green to bluish green. Finally the chinese material was usually more saturated and more evenly colored than the Panjshir stones with bluish green being the dominant color but globaly the Chinese emeralds had a lower luster and transparency compared to the gems from the Panjshir mines.
For emeralds as for rubies it has to be understood that the local dealers have probably rapidly understood that we were not big buyers but gemologists searching some samples which were more looking than buying.

As a result it is likely that many stones were not shown to us. Our report of the Namak mandi market is as a result to be seen only as what it is: A far to be complete glimpse of what Namak Mandi produce.

GGIP: The Gem and Gemological Institute of Peshawar: Besides visiting the Namak Mandi market we went also to visit the GGIP, located near Peshawar tourism office.
In this institute, supported by the government of Pakistan, local people can learn how to cut and carve gemstones for a very reasonable fee. The complete course is about 10 months as following: Gemstone cutting four months, gemstone carving four months and finally gemology: two months. The cutting classrooms were well equipped with Japanese made machines and their local imitations. At the time of our visit, the GGIP has just signed an agreement with AIGS gemological school in Bangkok, Thailand in order to offer in the future in Peshawar the complete gemological course currently available in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. With a 6 months complete gemological course (including three months stuying gemstone identification, one months working on diamonds, one on colored stones grading and finally one month learning about how to identify synthetics and treatments) and its eight months cutting course, Peshawar will probably become an interesting place to study, but sadly it was still not clear if foreigners would be allowed to study in the future at the GGIP.

Here is a modified satelite map created from Google Earth on which you can follow our summer 2006 fieldtrip to the Mingora Emerald Mine (34°47'20"N 72°22'11"E) in the Swat valley. You can see on the following view that the mines are very close to the Mingora City.

On June 21st 2006, In order to complete our study of the emerald market in Pakistan, we had a one day field trip to the Swat province to visit the famous Mingora emerald mine and the Mingora Gemstone market.
The Swat province is known to produce emeralds since the 1960's. At this time the mines were working under the rule of the Prince of Swat. In 1969 they passed under the gemstone corporation of Pakistan until its dissolution.

Since 1995 they are under the control of the Provincial Government of the NWFP and are operated by private operators under lease agreement that can be obtained from an auction system. We were told that there are several mining areas in the Swat valley with the main operation few hundreds meters over the Mingora city (34.46.43N 072.21.30E). This main operation operate using 2 mining methods: open pit and tunnel mining. We were able to visit both of them despite the fact that the mine was currently closed due to a legal case between the local government and the operator.

At the Mingora mine, the emeralds are found there as we could see in a "whitish silvery" or white talc schist matrix. We saw 3 mining tunnels located over the area where the open pit mining was formerly performed. We visited the lowest of these three tunnels. It was a 20 meters deep tunnel penetrating horizontally inside the mountain. This strait tunnel had one side gallery on the left around 7 meters after the entry. We did not visited the side gallery.

If the production at Mingora has officially stopped we were told that some mining is currently present in some other less important areas at Shamoozi on the north west of Mingora, Gudjurkali near Malanjaba in the east of Mingora and in the Shangla district further in the east of Mingora but we were not able to visit these areas.

We could see some small quantities of rough or cut Swat material both at the Mingora and Peshawar markets, local dealers were globally agree that the biggest fine quality Swat emerald they have seen was around 5 carats size after cut while most of the material under 1 carat size. The Mingora market was interesting as we could see there some interesting emeralds from the new Davdar mining area in China and a parcel of big crystals of an average low quality told to origin from the Gilgit area.

We left Islamabad to Muzafarabad on August 5th 2006 after our return from China with a car and a Mr Sardar Saeed Akhtar, geologist and assistant director at the Geological Survey of Pakistan. We drove through beautiful mountains covered with forests which was a pleasure after these 2 months spend on arid areas. On August 6th, we tried to take the road to Kel following the Neelam river but the heavy monsoon rains during the previous days created many landslides.

These landslide were more numerous than usually as the land was damaged by a major earthquake in October 2005 killing more than 90.000 people. Finally we returned to Muzafarabad.
On August 7th as the roads were still blocked we decided to abandon our car, we took our bags and crossed the landslides walking. It was quite dangerous as the ground was not stabilized and rocks were regularly falling from the top of the mountain but nobody was wounded. We then continued walking until we found a vehicle willing to take us to the next landslide. We took like that five different vehicles this day and arrived late at night in a remote village still 5 hours from Kel.

Here is a short movie I took on the way to the Nangimali Ruby mines. This video shows the difficulties we encountered in the Neelam valley passing the numerous landslides. The landslide presented here was less than 10 km from Muzaffarabad and it is the place we had to abandon our vehicule. Few minutes after the people you can see on the video we also passed the landslide walking. Of course walking through landslides is not at all recommended. It is very dangerous and we advise people not to follow our bad example...

Here is a modified satelite map created from Google Earth on which you can follow our Summer 2006 fieldtrip to the Nangimali Ruby mining area (34°57'25"N 74°27'17"E) located on the top of a daring cliff over the Utili Domel village in a deep valley over Kel in Azad Kashmir few hundred meter from the Indian-Pakistani cease fire line of control.

On August 8th we left again early to continue our trip and arrived in Kel a little bit before lunch time to take directly a drive to Utili Domel (34° 57 67N, 74° 28 51E, 2900m altitude) the closest village to the mines. There we met Mr Mumtaz Hussain Rathore from AKMIDC (Azad Kashmir Mineral Industrial Development Corporation) which offices are in Muzafarabad. AKMIDC is the state owned company in charge of the mining.

After our arrival in Utili Domel we went on a walk to a marble cliff called Chitakata (34° 56 94N, 74° 28 39E, 2941m altitude) where one month ago they started to mine ruby. Mr Mumtaz Hussain Rathore told us that 19 kilos of ruby was mined during the last 25 working days. The miners are working in Chitakata with a pneumatic drill and around 10 people are working this new cliff. Currently the main mining operation is an horizontal tunnel wich is around 6 meters deep as it was started only around one month ago.

It was interesting to see that at the entrance of the tunnel several rubies were visible on the surface of the marble. Around 300 meters from this starting mine some older galleries are present which were mined as a test for more than 3 years and produced only very few low quality stones.

We saw the mine production composed of attractive pinkish red stones lacking of transparency to be top quality but could be possibly a suitable material for heat treatment.
Rubies there are found in marble and associated with numerous pyrite and green mica (probably fushchite).