Qualla: Premier Mine

Premier Mine: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:Katangais, CC BY 2.5 za. In January 1905, a mine superintendent on an evening inspection noticed something glinting in the wall of the pit, just below the surface. He levered it out with a pocket knife, half-convinced it was a chunk of glass planted as a joke. It was not. It was the Cullinan - 3,106 carats of flawless blue-white crystal, the largest rough gem-quality diamond ever discovered, and it had come out of the ground here, at the Premier Mine near the town of Cullinan, some forty kilometres east of Pretoria.

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Image: User:Katangais | CC BY 2.5 za

Premier Mine: A Pipe of Fire

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. The mine is not a tunnel chasing a vein but a hole bored straight down into a kimberlite pipe - a carrot-shaped throat of an ancient volcano that, more than a billion years ago, blasted up from the deep mantle carrying diamonds frozen inside it. The surface scar covers about thir...

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Image: Public domain

Premier Mine: The Great Star of Africa

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit NJR ZA, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Cullinan was too valuable and too unprecedented to sell easily; it sat unsold in London for two years before the Transvaal government bought it and presented it to King Edward VII. The job of cleaving it fell to the celebrated cutter Joseph Asscher in Amsterdam, who studied t...

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Image: NJR ZA | CC BY-SA 3.0

Premier Mine: A Roll Call of Giants

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jengo1961, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Cullinan was the most famous, but the mine kept producing marvels. The Golden Jubilee, 755 carats in the rough, became the largest faceted diamond in the world. The Niarchos came out at 426 carats, the Premier Rose at 353, the De Beers Centenary at 275 - each a small fortune ...

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Image: Jengo1961 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Premier Mine: A Mine, a Town, a Legacy

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gardner F. Williams, Public domain. The story of the Premier is also a story of who profited and who labored, and how that balance shifted. For most of the twentieth century the mine and the global diamond trade were dominated by De Beers, and when De Beers sold Cullinan in 2007 for a billion rand, the buying conso...

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Image: Gardner F. Williams | Public domain