Pearls get pride of place at Beijing show

[Photo provided to China Daily]

The exhibition traveled to the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2013 and Istanbul last year.

For thousands of years, people living along the Persian Gulf seashores, including in Qatar, depended on hunting and trading natural pearls.

According to Hubert Bari, the exhibition's French curator, who holds a doctorate in mineralogy, 80 percent of the objects on display feature natural pearls.

The exhibition first corrects the perception that a pearl is formed around a grain of sand. Several shells on display show that pearls mostly arise from a shell's defense mechanism when being attacked by parasites.

Visitors can also see an abalone shell from New Zealand in which an invading worm, 6 centimeters long, is transformed into a pearl, and an oyster shell from Indonesia that contains a fish pearl.

Viewers can see the fish bones with the help of X-ray scans.

To collect these natural wonders, divers relied on guts and experience while braving threats ranging from dangerous creatures and huge waves to the possibility of drowning.