Azurite and Malachite

Unknown Owner

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Big, beautiful, blue glistening botryoids of Azurite are richly and aesthetically mounded very three-dimensionally on this gorgeous piece from the Liufengshan copper mine in China! Individual botryoids measure 1 to 2 cm across; however, the large aggregate front-and-center on the piece measures 4.5 cm across! The royal blue Azurite provides great color contrast to the elongate ridges and the single ball of bright green Malachite found along the periphery of the piece. Just a stunning and attractive display piece from the best Azurite locality in China, for sheer color. This now-famous 2006 pocket had just been found and one dealer bought a vast quantity in China, but it arrived too late to be sold at the Tucson Show in February of that year. I bought the contents of much of the pocket out of the bed of a dealer’s pickup truck in the parking lot. This is NOT a specimen from that deal. Rather, this was one of the few pieces that the dealer, Ken Roberts, pulled from the lot and kept for his personal collection all these years until I bought much of that recently. For the beauty and balance, it was special, even then, in context of a truckload of them all.