A stone comes out of the ground in a very few places and passes through a very few rooms before it reaches anyone's finger — the pit, the sorting house, the trading floor, the cutting bench. Five towns hold those rooms.
Four bourses sit within a few streets of Hoveniersstraat, a district that has long claimed some four-fifths of the world's rough diamonds by value and still turns over about $19 billion a year across roughly 1,300 firms. The Antwerpsche Diamantkring, established in 1928, was the first exchange anywhere dedicated purely to rough.
Around 90% of the world's diamonds are cut and polished here, overwhelmingly in small workshops. The Surat Diamond Bourse, opened in December 2023, has 7.1 million square feet of floor space across nine linked towers — certified by Guinness as the largest office building on earth.
The 1871 rush on Colesberg Kopje drew 50,000 diggers who hauled some 2,700 kg of diamonds out of the Big Hole by hand before it closed in 1914. Cecil Rhodes bought out Barney Barnato here in 1888 to form De Beers Consolidated Mines. The town's name is stamped on the trade twice over: kimberlite is the rock that carries diamonds up from the mantle, and the Kimberley Process — the conflict-diamond certification scheme now binding 59 participants covering 85 countries — was created at a meeting held here in May 2000.
Geologists found the kimberlite pipe here on 13 June 1955 and radioed the coded message 'we have lit the pipe of peace, the tobacco is excellent' — so the pipe, and then the town, were named for peace. Open-pit digging ran until 2001; the underground mine beneath flooded in 2017, killing eight.
De Beers moved its global rough-diamond sales operation out of London to here in 2013, and the government of Botswana owns 15% of the company itself. Debswana — the fifty-fifty partnership between the company and the government, headquartered in the city — is the world's leading diamond producer by value, and the first of the country's great pipes was found at Orapa in March 1967, months after independence.
Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.