In 1952, a British gem dealer in Myanmar bought a deep red crystal believing he’d found a ruby — he had actually stumbled onto a mineral so rare that for the next fifty years, only a handful more were ever found anywhere on the planet

He had actually bought a mineral so scarce that decades later the entire known global supply still fitted in a single museum drawer. Pain was a British gem dealer and collector working the Mogok gem tract in Upper Burma, the valley that has been feeding rubies and sapphires into the world market for centuries. In 1952 he sent a deep garnet-red crystal weighing 1.7 grams, recovered from one of the small ruby mines near Ohngaing village, off to London. Painite holds calcium, zirconium, aluminium, boron and oxygen together in one structure, given in the Handbook of Mineralogy as CaZrAl9O15(BO3). Rossman bought a bag of low-grade gem gravel at Namya in northern Myanmar, carried it home, and found two painites sitting in it.