Coming to the pearl farming and processing farm off the coast of Phu Quoc, visitors will be amazed at the complicated process to get ravishing pearls.
Phu Quoc Island in the south of Kien Giang Province is famous for many rare and precious products, the most prominent of which are pearls. Phu Quoc pearls are rare and high quality, favored by many domestic and foreign tourists.
Rach Vem farm with a scale of more than 500 hectares is considered the largest pearl farming farm in Phu Quoc.
This farm has nearly 200 employees. Each person has a stage, everyone is enthusiastic about their work. According to the workers here, the profession of raising mussels for pearls has been developed for a long time in Phu Quoc. This sea has favorable hydrological conditions to cultivate precious mussel varieties in the world such as Maxima, Tahiti, Akoya…
Pearl culture facilities in Phu Quoc are often located in calm seas. To successfully culture pearls is not an easy thing, requires experience and perseverance as well as applying modern methods with great cost.
To ensure that most of the mussels produce good quality pearls, the cultivator selects the mussels according to strict standards for size, age and gonadal status…
After that, the worker will perform the stage of implanting the desired nucleus into the gonads of the mussels. Note, when transplanting, must use specialized equipment and follow the rules so that the son cannot eliminate the cultured nucleus.
Having more than 6 years of experience in pearl implantation, Mr. Hai said: “To create pearls, pearl farmers put the kernel inside the son, stimulating the process of creating pearls. Due to the aesthetics, the user Pearl users often prefer round shapes, so when inserting kernels, they often use round shapes.
Next, the mussels will be transferred to large iron cages with a standard distance and put into the culture area. The whole process of creating pearls of mussels takes place completely naturally. The mussel will secrete mother-of-pearl and then wrap the implanted nucleus and form a pearl.
Sons are nurtured, monitored for health status, weight and adaptation periodically to ensure the pearl-making process. Depending on the size of the nucleus, the time to culture pearls ranges from 6 months to 8 years or longer. Around August – October every year is the time to harvest pearls of Phu Quoc people.
Pearls that have a lot of stains or are not round according to standards will have to undergo an additional processing stage to create the most perfect product before reaching the customer.
The pearls are harvested with many colors such as ivory white, yellow or black…, then retailed to showrooms and pearl sales branches on Phu Quoc island to serve domestic and foreign tourists. The price of each pearl ranges from a few million dong to hundreds of millions of dong, depending on the color and size of the pearl.
Sharing about the difficulties of output for products, Mr. Luu Tuan Vu (manager of the pearl farm in Rach Vem, Phu Quoc) said: “Currently, many people still consider pearls a product only for In the upper class, the trust in Vietnamese pearl products of domestic customers is not high. Along with that, people have many alternatives such as gold, silver, diamonds… Therefore, pearls have not been able to thrive in the Vietnamese market.”
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