Indonesian pearls long before the industry
These waters supplied the world with pearls for centuries before anyone spoke of cultivation. Some of the milestones were recorded by outsiders who simply happened to pass through.
Before the European record
The Bugis and Makassar were known for diving pearl oysters from the depths of the Sulawesi Sea. In the fourteenth century the Majapahit kingdom carried Indonesian pearls along its maritime trade routes, setting them in royal regalia and presenting them to foreign officials. When the VOC arrived in the sixteenth century, its trading monopoly was resisted by local divers and pearl traders.
Dobo, and the name that stuck
The town of Dobo in the Aru Islands became a pearl trading centre, and the silvery white pearls from those waters were known on the European market as Dobo pearls. It is where the name Indonesian South Sea Pearl comes from.
Dobo in the Aru Islands grew into a pearl trading centre. The silvery white pearls from those waters became known on the European market as Dobo pearls.
The naturalist Alfred Wallace stopped at Dobo and found several hundred people of many nationalities living there, drawn by the pearl oyster.
Anna Forbes described mounds of pearl oysters being counted and stacked at Dobo before shipping to Makassar and on to Europe. Aru pearls, she wrote, fetched the highest prices in Europe.
The first pearl cultivation trial outside Japan was run off Buton Island, Southeast Sulawesi, by Mitsubishi in partnership with the Dutch colonial administration.
Pearls grown at Buton were shown at the New York World’s Fair. Their size astonished the jewellery trade, at a time when Japan itself was producing only far smaller Akoya pearls.
The Indonesian government formally backed sea pearl cultivation as part of its economic diversification effort.
Indonesia became the world’s largest producer of South Sea Pearls, supplying around 43 percent of global demand.
And the fall
From 1994 the value of Indonesia's pearl trade fell sharply. Competition from other producers pushed prices down; reef damage and pollution pushed production down. The heaviest blow was the 2008 Lehman crisis, which cut trade value by around 70 per cent and closed many businesses. What survived were the companies able to adapt, and they are most of what the directory records today.
Drawn from all three ASBUMI source documents. All three remain drafts and disagree with each other on several figures.