The Luc Yen Morning Market

Where the women run the spinel trade, the noodles are clear, and the rice wine is fierce.

You leave Hanoi at 5am because the market in Luc Yen opens at 7 and closes by 10. The drive is four hours through the karst country of northern Vietnam, limestone hills rising vertically out of rice paddies, the kind of landscape Chinese painters spent a thousand years trying to capture and that you can see, from the back seat of a Toyota Hiace at sixty kilometres an hour, was always real and they were always documentary artists. The fog burns off around six. The buffalo are in the fields. Women in conical hats walk single-file along the shoulder with bundles of greens balanced on shoulder poles. You drink the bad coffee the driver brought in a flask. You watch the country wake up.

Yen Bai province is not where most foreign gem buyers go. Most foreign gem buyers go to Bangkok and stop. Some go to Sri Lanka. Some go to Tanzania. The serious ones go to Colombia and Madagascar. Almost none of them come to Vietnam, which is exactly why we do.

The thing in Luc Yen is spinel. Red spinel specifically. Some ruby. Some sapphire. But the spinel is what makes the trip worth it.

The Market

The market itself is a small open-air affair under blue tarps, in a clearing at the edge of town. Maybe forty stalls. Maybe sixty on a good morning. The dealers are almost all women. This is the part that surprises every Western buyer the first time. In every other gem market on Earth, Bangkok, Bogotá, Ratnapura, Mogok, Tana, the dealers are men. The women may be present, may pour the tea, may do the books, may in fact run everything quietly behind the scenes, but the trading floor is male. In Luc Yen, the trading floor is female. The women are mostly Tay and Dao ethnic minorities from the surrounding villages. They wear the indigo-dyed clothes of their groups, often with intricate embroidery at the cuffs and collars. They sit on small plastic stools behind low folding tables, with their stones laid out on small velvet pads or in plastic compartments inside hard cases. They negotiate in Vietnamese, with a calculator, with a great deal of laughter. They are, individually and collectively, some of the toughest gem dealers I have ever met.

The stones are not arranged for tourists. There are no signs in English. There are no photographs. There is no website. Pricing is in Vietnamese dong, the calculator is the lingua franca, and the negotiation is a back-and-forth of typing numbers, shaking heads, laughing, typing new numbers, offering tea, and laughing again. If you don’t speak Vietnamese, you go with a guide who does. The guide is paid a small commission by you and possibly another small commission by the dealer, which is fine and is how it should be, because the guide’s loyalty is to the relationship over time, not to any single transaction.

Why Spinel

Let me explain spinel briefly, because most readers of this blog will not have heard of it, and that fact is itself the point.

Spinel is a separate mineral species from corundum, which gives us ruby and sapphire, but for several centuries, basically until the development of modern gemological instruments in the late 19th century, it was confused with ruby. Most “rubies” in the great European royal collections, when they were finally tested, turned out to be spinel. The most famous example is the Black Prince’s Ruby in the British Imperial State Crown, a 170-carat polished but uncut red stone that was assumed to be ruby for six hundred years and is, in fact, spinel. The Timur Ruby, also in the British crown jewels, is also spinel. Catherine the Great’s ruby, same. The list is long.

Spinel is harder than emerald, 8 versus 7.5 on Mohs, almost always untreated, available in spectacular reds, hot pinks, lavenders, and cobalt blues, and roughly a quarter the price of comparable ruby. Heating does very little for spinel, so the trade has never bothered. By any rational analysis, it is one of the great underpriced gems on Earth. The Western market still does not know what it is. The Asian market, particularly Chinese collectors, has figured it out and has been quietly buying up the good material for the last decade. Prices are climbing fast and have probably already risen 200 to 400 percent since 2015 for top material.

The Burmese spinels from Mansin and Namya, the famous “Jedi” spinels, named because their neon hot pink colour looks like a Star Wars lightsaber, are the trophy material, and we have held a few over the years. The Vietnamese material from Luc Yen is different but equally compelling: more saturated reds, sometimes with slight purple undertones, and an availability that is, for now, real. The Burmese material is largely played out. The Vietnamese are still flowing.

Why We Don’t Sell It

I should be honest about something. We don’t actually sell much spinel in Vancouver.

The reason is simple: nobody asks for it. The first-time engagement ring buyer in Vancouver is asking for a diamond, or a sapphire, or occasionally an emerald or ruby. They are not asking for spinel because they have never heard of it and have not seen it on Pinterest. The market in our shop is almost entirely demand-led. Clients come in with ideas, we work within those ideas, and we expand them where we can. Selling spinel proactively means educating every client from scratch about a gem they have no frame of reference for, and the conversion rate on that conversation is, in my experience, low.

So why do we go to Luc Yen?

Because we love the stones, and because the women at the morning market are extraordinary, and because some of our clients, the second- and third-purchase clients, the ones who already trust us and are ready to be guided, will sometimes ask for something different. When they do, we have a small drawer in the shop that nobody sees on Instagram, and in that drawer are the spinels we have brought back from Luc Yen and Burma. We open it for the right clients, and sometimes one of those stones becomes a ring, and that ring will be the only ring of its kind in Vancouver, possibly in Canada, and the woman wearing it will spend the rest of her life answering “what is that, it’s gorgeous, it’s not like anything I’ve ever seen,” and she will smile and say it’s spinel, and most of the people who ask will have never heard the word, and that, frankly, is part of why she wears it.

The Food

Northern Vietnamese food is its own world, and it is not what most North Americans imagine when they imagine Vietnamese food.

Phở bò, beef pho, was invented in Hanoi in the early 20th century, and the version you eat there is different from what you have eaten in Vancouver. The broth is clearer. The herbs are fewer. The whole thing is more restrained: a beef and bone broth simmered for half a day with charred ginger and onion, served over rice noodles with thin slices of raw beef that cook in the bowl, with a small plate of herbs and bean sprouts on the side that you may or may not add depending on your preference. Hanoians often add nothing. Saigon-style adds everything. You eat it for breakfast, standing or on a plastic stool, for about a dollar fifty, and it is one of the great breakfasts on earth.

Bún chả, grilled pork patties in a fish sauce broth with rice noodles and herbs, was Obama and Bourdain’s famous lunch in Hanoi in 2016, and the place they ate, Bún Chả Hương Liên, has become a tourist attraction and is still, somehow, completely fine. The dish itself, caramelised pork, smoky from the grill, in a sweet-sour-salty broth with herbs and noodles you assemble yourself, is the lunch I order more than any other when we are in Vietnam.

In Yen Bai you find more rustic fare: grilled bamboo rice, sticky rice cooked inside a bamboo segment over a fire, smoky and slightly green from the bamboo’s resin; thắng cố, a horse-meat stew the H’mong make, which I will admit takes a few attempts to appreciate; sticky rice with pretty much anything. The rice wine, rượu, is fierce, homemade, served in tiny glasses that get refilled the moment you put them down, and the dealer is pouring, and you are drinking, because that is the relationship.

What Gets Bought, What Doesn’t

The morning we got there was a good morning. We bought several parcels of small red spinels, accent stones, melee, pieces in the 0.3 to 0.8 carat range that do not make headlines but that go into halos and accents and the little side stones of bigger rings. We bought one larger piece, around 2 carats, deep red, slightly purplish, that I have in the case in Vancouver as I write this and that has been sitting there for fourteen months because no client has yet been the right client for it. It will be. Eventually. The right stones wait.

We did not buy a piece I really wanted: a 4-carat fancy-shape spinel, hot pink almost into Jedi territory, that the dealer wanted more for than I was willing to pay. She was right to ask. I was right to walk. The stone has probably long since gone to a Chinese dealer. The transaction did not happen, but the relationship continued. I will see her on the next trip, she will remember me, she will show me different stones, and one of those will be the one.

That is also how this works.