De'An Fluorite, a blast from the past.

So I came back to the USA for the Denver show, and of course I ended up buying more Chinese fluorite. While I hesitate to call anything from China a “classic” just yet, I do find myself noticing that some once ubiquitous items seem to have largely disappeared—I have seen almost none of this material available in China. Along with the cubo-octahedral Shangbaos, the ultra-transparent green Xianghualings, and the assorted blue-purple Yaogangxian cubes, all of which (unlike these) continue to trickle out, I do think that these are one of the most saliently recognizable habits from the 2000-2010 “era” of Chinese fluorite, before all the Xiayang and Inner Mongolian material appeared.

I remember going to Tucson as a highschooler in 2003 or 2004, it must have been at the Smuggler or La Quinta, back when the show promoter used to segregate the foreign dealers at the secondary venues— I remember at least a couple rooms had display shelves filled with plates of these very distinct fluorites. One memory that always sticks in my mind is of a particular double-suite, the adjoining room had a wall display, nearly floor to ceiling with nothing but these plates, all neatly backlit.   At the time I could only afford a flat of small ones that had not turned out so well post-cleaning, but 20 years later I guess I was able to finally get some. Actually it was a nice surprise to run into a Chinese dealer in Denver who had a stash of these purchased years ago— I haven’t seen more than 2 good ones in the Guilin market (at prices higher than mine) and I feel like they don’t turn up online that much anymore.

The astonishing prep work that went into these should also be mentioned— like most things from De’An, these were discovered with a stubborn quartz coating. You might recall the purple dodecahedrons that preceded these, the work was more obvious— usually there would be half-embedded crystal neatly centered in a trimmed quartz matrix, you could see a 3-5 mm border on all sides of the crystal where material would have been removed to expose it. The only way to remove the quartz without damaging the fluorite was with hydrofluoric acid—insanely dangerous considering the size of the specimens and the amounts that would have to be used. As I write this, I stopped to confirm this with my girlfriend—she remembered seeing the white plates years ago, in fact she added that her cousin’s husband handled quite a bit as mine-run material in the later years of its production, and she relates that “his mouth was black” (her exact words) as a result of all the cleaning he had to do—I have no idea what the medical reason would have been, but clearly working with the chemicals needed to prepare these and being around the fumes was quite hazardous (he’s fine now, by the way, with two great kids). I have no idea who prepared these particular specimens, but it must have been the same process, with the same level of risky artistry required to prepare these beautiful plates.

Most of these are really big. Like the dimensions don't exactly convey the sizes... I was posting these after photographing and measuring, then went to organize them and store them-- despite the fact that I had already been handling them, I was a bit surprised how much bigger they seemed, after having stared at the pictures for a couple hours...