Takeo Province - Cambodia's Topaz Mines

Takeo is the name for both the Cambodian Province and for its Provincial Capital. Takeo town: roomy, uncluttered, quiet and slow; it is about an hour's drive from the Vietnamese border.

The Province is located in the midst of the flat, rainy-season flooded Mekong Delata. As you can imagine, rice growing is very important to the local economy, and with all of the water, so is fresh-water fishing. A stay in Takeo would not be complete without sampling the fresh water shrimp, big and sweet, and unfortunately, increasingly expensive.

In the town itself there is little sign that topaz gemstones are an important part of the local economy. In a visible sense, they are not. Not the way that sapphires rubies once were in Pailin Province, or that Zircon still are in Ratanakiri Province. You walk up the main streets in both Provincial centers and you see lots of shops But in Takeo there are middlemen and women who have shops in town, shops for both the cut stone and for topaz gem rough. And at the base of the mountain where the mines lie, near the Vietnamese border, an informal set of shops have set up business.

I had visited the town about two years ago with a good friend of mine who (with his wife and children) run a jewelry counter at Psaa Toul Tompoong (Russian Market) in Phnom Penh. The stones that I saw then were beautiful. A lot of clear, clean, colorless Topaz was being found and cut on the mountain and sold at its base; if you wanted rough, you could buy that in town, but you had to know where to go, as my friend did.

What brought be to town this time was the rumor that light-shaded blue topaz was being sold. Though I have studied gemstones (colored stones mainly) at GIA Bangkok and at AIGS, I thought that the color of blue topaz was only a product of heat treatment and irradiation (as the deep blues that we typically see in jewelry shops are); I thought in short that there are no natural blues. It turns out that there are naturally blue stones found at mine sites (very light colored ones), but the blue stones found in Takeo are something entirely different as this series of blogs will reveal!