It is home to the trading houses, the gemological institutes, the Synagogue, the Diamant Beurs, the stone cutters and the shops selling supplies for the industry.

Contrary to a common belief, diamonds are not rare. But unlike rarer stones like emeralds, diamonds are valued and categorised through the four C’s : Carat, Clarity, Colour, Cut. The constantly updated Rapaport list provides diamond traders around the world with reference prices on this basis. Diamonds can therefore be attributed an objective value, which also makes them an interesting investment proposition.

Antwerp has been a center for diamonds since the 15th century. Henri Keesje, a 5th generation trader, explained to us that the industry was boosted in the 19th century through the Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe. Hassidic Jews dominated the Antwerp diamond industry for a long time. After the second world war Antwerp encouraged the surviving Jews to return to Antwerp, providing the diamond trade with a generous tax and customs regime. Within the last two decades much of the cutting and polishing has moved to India, incidentally the country where diamonds were first found and appreciated 6000 years ago. Antwerp is now concentrating on the larger stones and complex cuts. But a large part of the diamond trade is still located in the city. Many of the traders now come from India.

Another major change to the diamond industry is the advent of lab grown diamonds on the market over the last five years. Physically they are the same as naturally grown diamonds, but costing just a fifth of the latter’s price. Some of the demand for diamonds has now shifted to lab grown ones and is putting pressure on the price for natural diamonds.

To identify if a diamond is natural or indeed lab grown is one of the tasks of the gemological institute we visited. In a darkened room at long tables people sit behind microscopes and computers examining diamonds, verifying the stones with the naked eye and a magnifying glass. You can have your one carat engagement ring diamond certified there for 50 Euros. The certificate will tell you if the stone is natural and how it meets the criteria of the four C’s. The number of your certificate can be engraved into the girdle of your diamond, so fine that you would need a microscope to read it. In their display case we could admire a real five carat diamond ! Amazing.

Our next port of call was a trading office, where people worked on their computers like in any other, but very crowded, office. Once in a while a person came by wishing to pick up or deposit some diamonds. Only the high security gave an inkling about the values that were changing hands here.

The Diamant Beurs on the other hand, is a big hall with windows from floor to ceiling and decorated with flags from around the world. On the many long tables hardly anyone was doing business. We recognised the room, however, from documentaries and TV series. The members of the Beurs have to submit to decisions of its arbitration board in cases of conflict. Failing to do so would lead to the publication of the trader’s picture and name in all the diamond trading floors world-wide and effectively end their ability to trade in diamonds. The Netflix series Rough Diamonds, which is set in many of the places we visited, has such a case as part of its story line.

Across the street we entered David’s, a stationary shop which appeared chaotic but the brother and sister trio knew exactly where to find everything needed for anyone working in the diamond business. They were the third generation, running the shop and spoke Yiddish amongst themselves, but were fluent in German, through their mother, as well as English, French and Dutch ! They demonstrated to us a pen-like contraption with which to identify if a stone was lab grown or natural - a bargain at 1500 Euro, when you could easily lose ten thousands of Euros by paying the price for a natural diamond, but receiving a lab grown one instead.

The highlight of the tour was our visit to Leo, the diamond cutter and polisher. He had a few rotating discs in his little dark cubbyhole and a sizable number of instruments with diamonds strapped into them for cutting. On the computer screen we could observe how he gave a rough stone a facet of perfect smoothness. He does work on many stones in parallel. The profession does not only require the perfect technique for the perfect cut but also the talent to ensure that the stone just reaches the value jump by being for example not 1,49 but 1,5 carats.

We had to go through a lot of very complex security checks to get into and out of the various buildings we visited. Strangely, the most intense scrutiny we faced was in the building where we were served our lunch ! It was a very nice Lebanese meal and we had the opportunity to exchange our impressions of the day and chat with some of the traders who were our guides.

A great thank you goes to the Austrian Group for organising this peek behind the veil of a secret and guarded industry. We would also like to thank Peter Franck of the Antwerp Diamond Industry and his colleagues for welcoming us so generously and answering all our many questions.

Gudrun Schmidt
German Group