New World Business
Business in New Worlds:
Work on the good side of globalization; live where and how you want.
Globalization is good. It can topple dictators, lift people out of poverty, help sick kids; it has no use for war, and could even safe our rain forest, if we want it to.
Recently, I visited the so-called “Russian-Market” in Phnom Penh. Deep inside its chaos, globalization can be more transparent than in the glass towers of Unilever or Coca-Cola. The potpourri of merchants peddles everything and anything, except “Russians” that is. In hippie-times, legend says, opium and pot were sections in any herb shop.
(BTW, speaking of business in unregulated markets: Yaba-Yaba a.k.a. meth or crystal was introduced in Asia as ingredient in a legal energy-drink. It took the various messy governments a decade to recognize and ban it. By then, tens of millions of unsuspecting Thais, Cambodians, and Vietnamese were going ‘Yaba’ or ‘crazy’ without their beloved wake-up-drink. Suddenly illegal, production went underground with most profits going to the Myanmar ‘government’. Against such, Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin looks like girl-scouts selling cookies.)
Today’s ‘Russian Market’ is more regulated but far from wholesome: it can be a study of the most poisonous fruits of globalization, the cheapest of the cheap, copies of Channel-bags, copycat iPhones, fake Nike shoes, and nail-polish which utterly dissolved my wife’s nails within two days (seriously). Producing this useless garbage plus most of the originals, Asia pollutes its lands and ancient rivers for generations to come.
Luckily, there is a brighter side to it: Naturally colored silk, woven reed products, more or less creative paintings, porcelain Buddhas, bamboo mats, unique products each different from the next, made to last a life-time by traditional craftsmen/women, small businesses, farmers, and artists. All for a fraction of what IKEA takes for the ten-thousandth-and-forth copy produced in mediocre quality.
Strolling here, with an eye for business opportunities, feels like inspecting a buffet on an empty stomach, although I’m busy enough with gemstones.
A group of mid-aged Westerners, three couples, upper middle class, part of an organized mini-bus-tour with build-in local experiences, the ideal focus group for every tourist minister, catch my interest. Living on local time, meaning there is always an extra hour to spend, I follow them, nothing creepy about it, I hope, just curiosity.
They’re surrounded by a noisy throng of kids and teenagers pulling at their sleeves and hands, either begging or trying to drag them in their uncle’s restaurant for an unforgettable diarrhea. Despite pale skin and blue eyes, I attract little attention. The large key ring clanging around my neck and the washed-out clothes tag me as local Westerner, not a tourist. I can get polite nods, a smile or stay unnoticed.
My fellow country-wo/men, on the other hand, Danes they are, move through the dense crowd like a cruise-liner of vivid colors, perfection, beauty and health. Cherry-red toenails and not-cheap watches radiate the famed ‘one-percent’. That it’s Cambodia’s 1% doesn’t matter. In a few weeks, back in Odense or Aarhus, they will make ends meet again, like everybody else. Now, they enjoy the admiration of a people culturally programmed to always be friendly and polite.
A booth with wood carvings attracts the women’s attention and they come to a halt. An old Cambodian lady squats on a tiny stool. I feign interest in the straw brooms offered by the next stall. The owner there gives me a friendly nod but then ignores me. She knows I’m not here for the brooms but, she thinks, for the Danish ladies, which is a tat embarrassing, yet for the locals us foreigners act often inappropriate, so never-mind.
In front of next booth, the Danes study wooden rhinos, cats and dogs. The old lady rises slowly from on a tiny stool, re-ordering the elaborated folds of the traditional if washed-out orange Sampot. Her lower vertebra hurt as they align to an upright position, then she stands slightly bent but with the pride of age that old people, especially women, in Asia are accustomed to. The way she scatters the rowdy kids with a single flick of her hand indicates that she’s the shop-owner and probably the matriarch of a large locally known family. A typical arrangement here. Men work, women run the business.
By now, the old lady is all nods and smiles, gesturing for the Danes to come ‘in’, though there is no real inside to come into. The women step up. The husbands linger with varying displays of boredom.
Next to the western ladies, the old women is a tiny creature, her eyes barely reaching the woman’s cleavage; a bundle of parched skin and twig-sized bones wrapped into orange cloth surrounded by three decorated fresh Christmas-trees. Aliens might identify them as two subdivisions of the planet’s dominate species.
The tallest woman, holding a wooden dog, suddenly looks discomforted and makes a brave effort to descend without condescending but ends in a forced looking position, uncomfortable, painful even. The old lady giggles a toothless jingle, reaches up and softly touches the woman’s shoulder, pulling her up and mimes her own back-pain. As the Dane straightens up, the lady gently takes the dog from her hands, a waxed dark wood exactly like the one on top of this page and, after a quick polish with a cloth that appeared from no-where, returns it proudly.
Each animal is different. This dog has long ears. I imagine a tiny cooperation far outside the big city, a well-organized bamboo-factory with a clean dirt-floor (yes, that’s possible), where the whole family, from toddler to grand-pa, daughters and husbands turn century-old tree trunks into decorative animals.
The men exchange smiles as a beautiful but forbiddingly young girl passes blushing and hiding her face from the men, which earns her even more chuckles. Luckily, their spouses are distracted. The tall lady has fallen for the long-eared dog and turns to the shop owner with the one question that needs no translation. The old lady studies the dog again, turning it around, as if she needed to check the bar code, before she announces in the utterly weird English only elder Asians can speak:
“Teeee dhoolaass.” Or thereabouts.
Language-wise it could have been ten, or thirty, or thirteen, except the lady holds up three slightly trembling fingers and repeats her price. The tall lady, surprised, makes sure she didn’t misunderstand:
“Three dollars?”
She’s witty enough to suppress further signs of contentment, but to me, and probably to the shop-owner it’s obvious she would’ve paid thirteen as well, or thirty, never-mind. Asking a Danish woodcarver, if she could find one, to create a unique dog from hard-wood and she’d be looking at something around the equivalent of two or three hundred dollars; for the deposit that is. The tall lady pulls out a YSL-purse. The shop-owner nods happily. Smiles all around.
Then it goes wrong.
As much as men have a magic radar for pretty women husbands have a similar instinct for their wives opening the purse. The thus magically pinged husband pushes in, exchanges a few short words in Danish, takes the dog and studies it with the critical eye of a life-long hardwood connoisseur. Then he frowns as only Vikings can, shakes his head and declares:
“No. No. We have seen the same dog for one fifty… over there!” He points to no-where inside the market’s chaos.
The old ladies’ smile holds tight but she stops nodding.
(BTW: Probably, there are woodcarving competitors in the market, however, they know one another for generations, with many married cousins, and define the mutually acceptable price-range and slightly different products at every marriage celebration. This honorable agreement is also the reason that she didn’t ask for thirty dollars. After-all, she is not stupid but a shrewd business-woman. Even though many tourists may pay-up, only two in ten would be profitable, her ‘competitor-associate’ would hear of it and come for an explanation. Raising prices for tourists to a multiple of what locals already consider expensive is frowned upon as dishonorable and greedy in the close-knit business community. Ignoring public opinion is not an option, and most importantly, it would attract loads of competitors from other places. Perhaps they could slowly double the price, but it would need to be negotiated first. The same dynamic works downwards. She cannot sell the dog for one-fifty without inviting disharmony. Such market sensitivities must be considered should you plan to start a business in a new country.)
The old lady turns to the husband and says:
“Is nicas dggg, veyy nicas! Ia mak!”
She looks to the wife for support. The latter turns with deep-filled lungs but stops dead when her husband raises a hand, face frozen. They are a well-played-in couple. She knows that face, that gesture. He may be a teacher, a department manager, or a policeman, used to give irrefutable orders professionally.
The old lady takes the dog from the grim Viking, tenderly stroking it, and floods the group with a long speech in her incomprehensible English. She’s probably praising the dogs’ fine wood, reiterates the work step its production involved, names the rent for her booth and ends with a plead for some profit, almost not smiling anymore. The husband stands, a rock in the storm of words, shaking his head.
The old lady looks around for anybody important watching before she resorts to the most humiliating gestures of all: raising her hand to the mouth in a sign of ‘hunger’. She is Cambodian middle-class and has, except during war times, not suffered hunger, but she knows that foreigners have a soft spot for the hungry poor.
And right she is. The wife, after getting redder and redder, suddenly turns dead pale, stamps her food and drowns her husband in Danish curses. The husband reacts with stubborn one-word remarks. The wives’ voice rises over the noise of the market and attracts attention left and right. Divorce seems to be on the menu. The old lady cringes at the loss of face, such a display of unfiltered emotions she may never have witnessed, in public, no less, in her shop. She has paled, too, checking the neighbors, which are watching with great interest, all smiling. I imagine she would give the dog away for free, if only these foreigners would stop people screaming. All she wants is to restore formal kindness.
Fortunately, the second husband steps in, elbowing his brother-in-arms, getting a few words in and the third husband lays a calming hand on the angry shoulder.
Only then, the first husband sees the cliff he was about to tumble down perhaps in a temporary blindness induced by the pretty local girl. He makes conciliatory noises and pulls out his own purse. Yet, some pride must be maintained. Hence, he haggles halfhearted with the old lady while his wife stares bloody bullet holes into his head.
In the end, the dog with the long ears changes owners for two-dollar-fifty.
Later in the Raffles, then the only decent hotel in town with rooms starting at $75 dollars, I see the husbands getting drunk on German beer at four bucks the pop.
How does that work out for the old lady and her Cambodian forests? It does not. Only utter ignorance serves as an excuse.
That dog was part of Cambodia’s dwindling ancient forests. Uncontrolled logging leaves behind irreparable destruction and sets off an ecological downward spiral of soil erosion, floods, reduced biodiversity and in the end turns forest to wasteland. Everybody should know this. Even those days.
The little wooden dog only has a symbolic meaning, but it shows how globalization should not be.
There are better ways, proven in the West and Japan: Sustainable forest management, wildlife protection and reforestation allow our forests to grow again. Financially, it has turned out that in the long run, well-managed forests are more profitable than burned and bulldozed one. That is true even without the aspect of stake-holders, instead of a pure share-holder view.
But don’t expect that Cambodian women to think about protecting forests and don’t wait for any enlightened government to do it. They do what they are paid for today, latest tomorrow.
We must learn to pay for valuable resources we use. There must be enough profit to carry selected logs per helicopter out of the forest instead of bulldozing roads through irreplaceable habitats, margin for better labor conditions, health insurance and retirement funds.
In an educated guess, the little mahogany dog should be no less than 30 dollars, which may be close to what ZARA-HOME would charge.
Want to start a business? Come and help the old lady to reach the global market, set-up a website, research the market, develop better products, and sell for $50 online. Give twenty to the old Lady, make sure she gets health insurance. Take ten to pay for sustainable wood harvesting. Pocket twenty for yourself. Sell only a few pieces per day and live a great life in a country full of kindness.
Of course, it’s not that easy, it takes guts and sacrifices. You’ll have failures, problems to adapt to local food, get ripped-off, run into bureaucracy, find products already occupied, but hey, working 9–4 with something you may have little interest in, and see the board getting rich and arrogant, that is IMO no life at all.
Failed? Try again. I can name you a dozen markets and products from memory. Lovely stuff I buy on every visit until an additional suitcase is needed.
In the other direction there is huge potential as well. Western know-how is badly needed in so many places. Think of Burma! A whole country lacking everything we have taken for granted since childhood, pocket calculators, tap water, dug-tape, headphones, not to mention IT, mobile phones, and SaaS.
It will be done. If not you, somebody else will jump at the chance. Like the guys who started exporting furniture from Bali in the 60ies. See their villas in Ubud today.
Globalization will continue, no matter who crows what, time wins all battles.
Edward Bristol, re-written 03.2020
P.S. Our gold comes from the Columbian “Corporación Oro Verde”. Oro Verde (“Green Gold”) is, like us, committed to bring the benefits of globalization to the mining areas while avoiding the ecological and social downfall that usually follows suit. With only 10% premium on international gold prices, Oro Verde does a great job in developing the local communities and protecting their environment. Read more here.
The Last Entrepreneurial Adventure:
Invest in a Sri Lankan Gem Mine
If you like business ventures off the beaten path, this is the ultimate challenge.Of course I’m not talking about a clean investment done via contract over 2,000 shares paid by checkin the air-conditioned business center of the Colombo Hilton.
I mean a serious business transaction done in instant cash somewhere in the jungle without telephone, contracts, lawyers or police (at least none you can trust).
Part I: How to find a good mine
Since you might not want to raise the price of “your” projected mine by 10.000% you will want to keep a low profile, at least as far as the color of your skin permits. So forget about geological studies or scientific analysis. Even if you wanted to, the government won’t let you analyze anything without a project approval that will wreck your nerves and takes at least five years.
How not to do it.
As an innocent businessman (if there is such a thing), you might do as follows: Rent a Jeep, hire a guide who knows his way around the Sri Lankan gem industry, and make arrangements to visit a mine.
Most likely you will end up in Ratnapura. You will be welcomed, filled up with tea and cake, shown how the most terrific stones are found, and you will think that your investment might be well placed there. And since the mine owners are currently in need of an investment for, let’s say, a new license or an additional generator, you count yourself lucky and close the deal in cash per handshake.
The next week, however, the mine runs empty, generators are out of stock, your guide disappears into the hospital, the mine owner is off for a funeral in Kandy and, finally, your Jeep breaks down.
While you sit in a rest house that deserves the name “Mosquito Inn” or “Instant Midlife Crisis” and wait for someone to call you back, you might begin to realize that you have made a mistake.
Actually, you have made at least two mistakes:
Mistake No. 1: They saw you coming.
You must not give them any time to prepare for you. As, per definition, an inexhaustible rich foreigner, you do not fall under any moral protection and anything goes if you give them time for thought and preparation.
This does not mean that they are bad people, by no means. They simply do things the way they have learned it from their great grandparents who learned it from theirs.
They don’t consider any long-term relationship with foreigners, who usually arrive, try to get rich as businessmen or amuse themselves as tourists, and then disappear again. So if you come and invest in their mine, they expect you to disappear soon and hence do not bother too much about fulfillment but are ready to promise you anything before somebody else does and takes all your money.
Mistake No. 2: Initial cash.
Never pay anything without immediate control over at least one crucial resource. Miners do not under any circumstances trust each other, so why should you?
If, for example, a family(!) mining team that has been working, eating and sleeping together for the last 20 years finds a valuable stone, they would never entrust one member to go alone and sell it, because who knows at what price he will sell it?
They will go all together, even if it means hard-core traveling for three days and leaving the mine alone. Or they will sell the stone locally and lose significant money compared to the price they could get in Colombo. If one of them is ill, they can’t sell the stone at all.
Again, they are not bad people. They would never blatantly steal from each other, but personal reliability over a period of time tends to become zero. So if they send their brother alone to Colombo to sell a stone, he might come back after four weeks, claiming he lost the stone and has spent all four weeks searching for it. And maybe he did somehow. Who knows?
Sri Lanka is one of those countries where two grown men, both respected members of their communities, will by the death of their mothers swear to have experienced two opposite and mutually exclusive versions of the same event.
While you stand there doubting your own perception and Western logic, both publicly announce that they will commit suicide if you don’t believe them. You will never find out who was actually lying or whether they were both lying a bit.
It is not an option in this culture to admit having been wrong or having lied. Even if you pile up evidence and thus force someone into a loss of face, it won’t help you! He will vanish without a trace, leaving his wife and 12 children behind rather than live with the shame of having been caught being wrong.
How to do it?
There might be other ways of doing it, but since we believe nobody has ever done this before us, our way may be the only way: We call it the “stupid tourist trick”.
First of all: Stay away from Ratnapura, for in Ratnapura they always see you coming.
What you then need is a not too good-looking car, a local driver, time and nerves of steel. Drive through the mining areas (which is practically everywhere in South Sri Lanka) and look out for idle men hanging around a village center swinging torches.
When you have found idle men with torches ask your driver to go and tell them he “has” a tourist who wants to buy gems.
You will have to put your head out of the window of the car or they will ignore your driver out of fear of police, since they are all semi-illegal.
After you have identified yourself as a “stupid tourist” these torch swinging idlers will unpack all the synthetics and imitations they can get organized immediately (like the 45 carat synthetic “ruby” crystal above).
After you refuse to buy these (which will easily involves two hours of simply saying “no-no-no”) they will show you the worst roughs they have, the “dead” spinel, the sprayed topaz and the painted white stones, like the 1000 carat ‘yellow’ sapphire in the photo.
If you still refuse to buy the bad stuff, they will start to respect you and might show you the first real stones, mixed up with those fakes you have already rejected five times and newly organized synthetics.
Surprisingly, you will not only find synthetics from Thailand (some perfectly disguised) but also cooked stones from Madagascar or diffused ones from India in these villages! How they come there seems to be a miracle but nevertheless it is a frustrating reality.
You’d better bring some food. You will not find anything edible in such a village, unless you want to spend the next days urgently searching for a restroom, which is a nightmare outside of Colombo.
Watch the people and you will recognize their strict internal hierarchies: who is a selling agent, who is retailing and, most importantly: Who is a stone owner?
That’s who you look for: A man with hands like steel pliers who owns good stones, meaning he might be a miner without a “Mudhalali” (Sinhala: “Protector”).
If you find such a man, buy from him and let your driver question him about his source. If you are lucky he has just started his mine or his Mudhalali is dead or went abroad and he is willing to show you his place.
Ask him to take you there immediately – not tomorrow or you will find them prepared. Don’t be surprised if you need to drive another two hours even if he said it is just two minutes or the other way around. Time estimates are of no value in Sri Lanka. Also be prepared to jungle-walk a good piece, since real mines (meaning not made for tourists) rarely have road access.
There are a lot of things to look at in order to judge a mine, but it would be against our interest to share this knowledge. After you have seen a few dozen mines, you will get a most amazing “feeling” for whether a mine is good or not. It is a combination of the hills, the old dry waterways, the current river, the way the Ilaam (gem gravel) is colored, and of course the capability and spirit of the team you find working.
The latter is a question of personal taste or work ethics. We ask ourselves:
– Do they drink arrack in broad day light?
– Do children work in the shaft?
– Are they respectful of each-other?
– Are they halfway organized?
– Do we like them?
To answer these questions you will need to spend some time there, so take food and mosquito repellent and forget even the basics of Western comfort.
Let’s assume you have found a place that you want to put your energy (and you money) into, then read…
Part II: How to be a Mudhalali
Gain immediate control over resources.
Find entry points for your money so that you can withdraw it at anytime. There is always need in many places. If you pay the school money for the kids instead of paying for a generator, you are on the safe side (the generator might vanish over night, the kids will hopefully not). Pay for petrol and food but don’t lend them any money. Buy new tools but don’t pay salaries. If they buy a new license keep the original and so on.
Keep people away from hospitals.
Sri Lankans love to go to the hospital and you will find that at least 25% of the population (including visitors) is there on any given day. Not that they simulate illness, but they will admit themselves as inpatients no matter whether they have cholera, ate the wrong food, got a cold, infected a fingernail or just don’t feel too good.
Hospital is free, good for a change of social life and significantly more comfortable than home. So why not? The downside is tremendous economical damage to the country and the fact that formerly healthy people do get seriously sick in hospital, where after all also truly dead-ill people are present and the hygenic standards are terrifying.
We always carry a mobile pharmacy and the 1,800 pages “Handbook of Nursing” with us to help with little complaints that can be cured easily and should not be the cause of yellow fever gotten in hospital.
The magic of Western medicine and a foreigner reading out of a big medicine book is for simple miners competitive to the hospital experience and you can reduce your sick staff’s sick rate by 90%. I’m afraid this is a horror for any one who has studied medicine but don’t worry, we do not operate on serious injuries or cure unknown sicknesses.
Take care of the kids.
Sri Lankans love their children. Help to get a daughter married or pay for the marriage party and you will have endless gratitude. Pay the school fees and you will be considered a family member. But remember: that doesn’t mean you should be so stupid to trust anyone, be it family or not.
Respect the religious ceremonies.
There is a lot of magic involved in mining. Depending on the moon, stars, symbolic happenings (like “dog shits on Illam”) and the outcome of ceremonial prayers, it may not be good to begin work before two in the afternoon or it may have to be stopped on Tuesdays. They are not just trying to arrange their free time, but actually believe that the findings are a result of correct interpretation of the magic signals. If you don’t believe in the magic and hinder them from respecting those signals you are simlpy doing wrong on every level. Besides, they will not find anything. Either it is a self-fulfilling-prophecy that comes to effect or they are just right.
Be the boss.
Don’t apply Western equality. Never work yourself. This is hard, especially for people who like to make things happen and thus like to work, but miners have no respect for a Mudhalali with dirty hands. You will have to get used sitting and drinking tea while watching others work.
Never let them repair a machine.
Sri Lankans will dismantle a big generator into its smallest pieces with greatest joy and without hesitation, and without knowing how to put it all back together, let alone repair it. You end up with a load of generator spare parts unless you find someone who has already successfully repaired precisely such a machine. Since you will most likely find such a person only 12 hours’ drive back in Colombo, buy only maintenance-free high quality machines and then pray that they don’t break down.
Don’t criticize people.
Whatever happens, you are not supposed to criticize anyone openly. Criticism is not a way to improve ourselves or others (as some progressive people try to see it) but a horrible loss of face. This is one of the most difficult lessons to learn, especially when you are actually horribly angry about a ruined generator or simply trying to tell a waiter why you can’t eat the food he served.
Negotiation has started at the moment when the ‘Sorter’ (meaning the guy who has the privilege to sort through the washed gravel) picks out a colored crystal and turns to you with his fiery eyes saying: ‘This is the one!‘
Ignore it. Do not let him deceive you and get excited. It will cost you a fortune.
And also, do not let them deceive themselves and get excited about what they found or they will soon dream of the new big house they will build. Once they have dollar sign in their eyes your own financial prospects will become very negative.
Therefore, immediately declare the found stone to be worthless and pretend not to be interested at all. It is part of the game. Do not let your curiosity lead you into looking at an interesting stone before you are ready to talk money. Every extra attention you give to a good stone will raise his price exorbitant. Look at it, mark it for later, and then ignore it.
When all is sorted the team will put you into a chair and place all finds on a plate filled with water. Don’t look at the stones but wait for the tea. After you got your tea, have a first look at the day’s outcome and start examining every stone equally and without any special attention to the ones you want to buy.
Let us assume you have found a rough that seems halfway promising (only 1 in 100 does) then you must quickly calculate to make a first offer. Keep the initiative. Naming a price first will get you away from the usual foreigner moon-prices.
Though after a while the miners realize they can’t get $2000 for a gram of yellow sapphire from you (as they heard others did from a foreigner), they will nevertheless start the game by asking for 2000 if you let them take the initiative.
It is very tiring to negotiate them down to the realistic $50 every time, so be quick and start the game on the right level. But be aware that any price you name is binding and if they agree you have to take it. There is no taking back an offer in Sri Lanka unless you want to ruin your reputation.
She just ate a kilo of cake!
When you name your price, unbearable despair and sorrow will overcome your mining crew.
They will tear their hair out, run around screaming and swear that they will give up mining if that is the price they get for all the hard work. They will show you their daily bruises and drag their hungry children to the table.
Don’t worry. You know the kids already ate the two kilo of cake which you brought in the morning. It is all show.
If they are in serious need they would have already asked you for help before the day started. That is the rule. Being Mudhalali and negotiating a price are two different parts of the play or better the stage. Therefore you have to be merciless. If you want to be generous do it only after you bought the stones. Anything else is bad for business.
No rough stone is too good to be wasted.
Fact is most cutters in Sri Lanka and elsewhere can (maybe) facet a stone, but nothing else, meaning they have no clue about how to make a stone truly shine and sparkle. Even if they don’t want to cheat you, chances are high they simply ruin your stones. Also, rarely can a cutter cut all shapes or varieties. One will be good on sapphire, while the other one is good on garnet and only the third knows how to make a star. A good lapidary is the key to the gem market.
How to find them? Trial and error based on recommendations.
Good cutters are not publicly accessible but work for someone else or run a quite home business in some hidden backyard you will never find on your own. Hence you need a recommendation to find him.
But just because someone recommends his cousin’s brother as a cutter does not mean he is good. You still have to try, which will cost you a fortune in cash, rough stones and foremost nerves. However, here are some do’s and don’ts to limit your inevitable novice bleeding:
1. Like in any scientific experiment do not change too many parameters at once. Do not change the variety, the cut, the lapidary and the mine at the same time. Ideally you give similar sized and colored stones to different lapidaries and compare the results.
2. Don’t underestimate the power of self full-filling prophecies. Respect the cutter’s opinion. If he says he cannot or would not cut this way or that way – so be it. If you insist he will surely show you how wrong this or that way was.
3. Start your experimental research with a cheaper variety, or (if you are patient) buy synthetic sapphires to test new cutters. They will usually not recognize the difference, but if they do you have a first indication of their qualities.
4. Do not pay per carat but per stone. Commonly cutters are paid per carat out-put, which leads them to optimize the size and not the quality of their cut. This absurd system is responsible for the globally feared ‘native’ cuts with fat bellies, potato shapes and depths like the Sargasso Sea.
5. Give people time to adapt and to change their (bad) cutting habits. The change from quantity to quality does not come overnight (especially not in Sri Lanka). You will have to invest into somebody to see it happen at all.
6. Nothing is easier than exchanging a stone on its way from the rough to the cut. Since you will not want to spend your days sitting on the lapidaries lap, you need to trust him sometimes. For this you need above all a social network. Establish a relationship to your cutter, know where he lives, know his wife and best be invited to his daughter’s marriage.
7. Finally: Don’t blame the messenger. If your cutter says you have bought ‘dead’ stones, you better listen. No lapidary can cut a bad stone into a beauty. For this you need an alchemist.
Don’t despair. After a few hundreds stones cut at different lapidaries, you will start to see some correlation between what you buy as a rough and what you set into jewelry one day.
May-be.
Edward Bristol
Colombo
A word about security: All gem trade is done in cash.
Coming down a lonely jungle path loaded with five years salary every Tuesday at ten in the morning is not clever. Sri Lankan gem buyers come with bodyguards in different cars and on different roads every week and always unannounced.
We do not take such radical measures and never had a problem, but some caution might be wise especially since you are foreigner and thus more likely to be talked about.
Being a Mudhalali does give you some protection in the direct neighborhood but people do travel to rob others.
If you play your part serious you might (in answer to their ask-price) throw yourself on the ground, claim immediate bankruptcy and describe the debtor’s jail your children will suffer in, if that is the price you have to pay.
Whether you play with stoic dignity or share in their emotional drama-show, don’t get soft. The back and forth of such a negotiation can take hours. Serious finds might take days to negotiate.
In the end, the dollars you want to pay less than what they ask equal amount of energy you have to raise to negotiate.
Buying rough.
So what is a good price? Buying rough is considered to be the most difficult and most risky part in the whole gem trade. Greenhorns easily buy ten stones to get one which turns out to be what they thought it is or were told it might be. Even with decades of experience hardcore gem traders misjudge the color of the rough, oversee inclusions or simply fall for a synthetic. No-one is free of failures.
Whatever your personal fallout-rate, you have to calculate with a certain percentage of bad judgment and will have to make it up with the good stones you buy.
The most tricky part buying rough is to “see inside the stone”. A potentially good rough needs to have a well colored glass-body-like inside without inclusions or color patches. To see inside the stone wet the stone with water or better oil, roll him between your fingers in straight sunlight, use the specially made gem torches and of course the hand lens.
Hardness pencils do not help with the main problem of imagining how a cut stone can come from the rough.
Beside inclusions, do not underestimate the effect of color axis in most stones. Only if the full color axis falls together with the direction a stone can be cut to the table will you harvest a good color in the final gem.
Recovery rate.
Any seller of rough will state that 50% recovery is “guaranteed” but that is very rare, especially if you don’t cut on weight but beauty.
The average over the time and all stones will be more likely 20% or less, meaning you must buy a gram rough to get a one carat cut gem. Do the math. How much can you offer?
Edward Bristol's Personal Website 
Hi
You shoud be the journalist with your great talent
Hi! This reminds me of a business school professor muttering advice to avoid underestimating developing country peers… Not too funny out of context; very funny after a course on markets for democracy spiced with fund-raiser charm…
Anyway, consider a link to the ‘Fair Trade’ side of the blog.
Kudos for both!
Hi Edward:
You have kept me entertained for many hours today. I first read your post on the ISG forum, then followed your link to your commercial site and read “The Last Entrepreneurial Adventure,” and more, then came to your noncommercial site and read everything on it. And I am still hungry. You are a wonderful writer and an amazing adventurer!
Please write more. And please write about yourself, too, where you grew up and how you came to be a gemologist, and whether you’ve ever done anything else. If you ever get tired of mining and dealing gems, you can sell your memoir.
BTW, I have visited both Sri Lanka (in 1982, just before civil war broke out) and Thailand (in 1982, 2007 and 2008), thus my delight in your stories.
Georgette,
Thanks a lot. That is the nicest compliment you can make me.
I have spend much time writing in my life and love it.
But I need to keep the self/psycho/ego out of it. So I am not writing much about me. It is hard to write about yourself without judgement.
Ed
Hello Edward Bristol!
I greatly appreciate Your writings, the experiences, the knowledge, the realism! Superb!
I have been to Thailand three times, lived 8 years in Mexico. I am just a collector, with some rare Chrome Sphene, Sphene, some Axinite, some Hessonite Garnet, some Clinozoisite (all, from Baja, Mexico). I have known my Mexican gem cutter for 25 years.
Best Wishes! Lino Sanchez
I thank you for your very educating and informing site. Should you happen to visit Tanzania one of this days pls do not hesitate to get hold of me we might have a story or two to share. I mine ruby (artisanal) in Winza, Dodoma, Tanzania. You sure, must have heard of such a thing like Winza ruby.
Kind Regards
Dr Shoo
Ed, thank you for sharing your tried-and-true education in the world. I truly learned at lot! …about gems and the business, and about people.
I appreciate your “wide-angel lens” on the world, connecting and comparing through several cultures!
Best regards,
Nimueh
Dear Mr Edward,your teaching are of good inspiration now i understand that need to be schooled in the busines.may God bless you
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LivPer,
Yeah, what crazy world in which it take me almost a year to say thanks for your message.
Well, I’m still there, as everybody fighting with this crazy environment.
Hope you are well!
Ed