Katlang pink topaz

The most wanted shade from this hill has a violet tinge, and the trade calls it cyclamen pink.

Northwestern Pakistan is known for producing pink topaz, and Ghundao Hill, close to the small town of Katlang, has been mined since 1972. GIA is careful about how rare the good material is: even at Ghundao Hill, that fine pink is only rarely found. Most of what comes out is not the cyclamen colour.

Handle it more gently than its hardness suggests. Topaz sits at 8 on the Mohs scale, which sounds robust, but it has poor toughness, so it chips and cracks if it is knocked. Hardness and toughness are different properties and topaz is the standard example of the gap between them.

Katlang sits inside a much bigger Pakistani gem economy. GIA's account of Namak Mandi, the gemstone market in Peshawar, describes the trade that moves stones like these out of the mountains and into the world, and Katlang is one of the sources feeding it.

For context on where else topaz comes from, Minas Gerais in Brazil is one of the most important sources of high-quality material and has been mined for more than two centuries, producing yellow to orange, red, pink and violet stones and blends of red with orange or purple. The nearby town of Ouro Preto, a UNESCO world heritage site of colonial churches and cobbled streets, is the fitting companion to that. Beyond Brazil and Pakistan the major sources today include Namibia, Nigeria, Madagascar, Mexico, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and the United States, along with the historic Russian localities.

This is a working mining area in Mardan District rather than a visitor site, so the realistic way to see Katlang topaz is in the trade or in a collection.