Afghan lapis lazuli (Sar-e-Sang)

The blue in Tutankhamun's tomb came out of this valley.

Sar-i Sang, also written Sar-e Sang, means stone summit in Persian. It is a settlement in the Kuran Wa Munjan District of Badakhshan Province, Afghanistan, in the Kokcha valley, and its lapis lazuli mines are the reason anyone outside Badakhshan has heard of it. The workings probably date from prehistoric times and consist of one old disused shaft and two newer ones. This was the main source of lapis lazuli in the ancient world, and stone from here turns up in the Royal Treasure of Ur and in Tutankhamun's tomb.

The scale of that ancient trade is worth sitting with. Writing in Gem and Crystal Treasures, Peter Bancroft records that the royal Sumerian tombs of Ur, near the Euphrates in lower Iraq, held more than 6,000 finely made lapis statuettes of birds, deer and rodents, along with dishes, beads and cylinder seals, and that this material almost certainly came from northern Afghanistan. Egyptian burials from before 3000 BC contained thousands of items of jewellery, many of them lapis. Egyptian women used powdered lapis as eye shadow, and later it was ground into the pigment ultramarine.

Pliny the Elder described the stone as "a fragment of the starry firmament", which is a better description than most modern ones.

What you are actually looking at is lazurite, a sodium and aluminium mineral of considerable complexity, and royal blue lapis is its gem variety. The ancients called it sapphire. The most prized material is a dark, nearly blackish blue, far deeper than turquoise and more intense than sodalite or azurite. Lazurite more often occurs in lighter shades streaked with calcite, which is attractive but less valuable. Only a few major deposits exist anywhere, Lake Baikal in Siberia among them.

This is remote, high, and in a province that has seen conflict for decades. Treat it as a place to understand rather than a place to visit, and buy the stone through the trade.