Why Has Nobody Talked About Chinese Pearls?

If you grew up in the West, you probably learned one thing about pearls: certain names, certain origins, certain price tags that signal quality. But Chinese pearls? Freshwater pearls? At best, you might have heard they're the "affordable option." At worst, you've been told to avoid them.

I'd like to change that. Because the story of Chinese pearls is one of the oldest, richest, and most overlooked stories in the jewelry world — and as a Chinese-American pearl jewelry maker, it's one I feel a responsibility to tell.

China Had Pearls Long Before the World Was Paying Attention

Records of pearl use in China date back to the Qin and Han dynasties — over 2,000 years ago. By the Tang Dynasty, Chinese women were already wearing pearl jewelry as a mark of elegance and status. This wasn't decoration. Pearls held cultural, medicinal, and spiritual significance. Traditional Chinese medicine has long recognized pearl powder for its calming, detoxifying, and skin-brightening properties — and Chinese women have been consuming pearl powder and using pearl-based skincare long before it became a Western wellness trend.

Empress Xiaoduan’s Nine-Dragon and Nine-Phoenix Crown, Ming dynasty, Wanli period (about 1573–1620). Excavated in 1957 from the Dingling Mausoleum in Beijing and now held by the National Museum of China, the crown measures 48.5 cm in total height and weighs 2,320 g, richly adorned with gold, gemstones, kingfisher-feather inlay, and 4,414 pearls.

This is a craft tradition with roots that run deep. And yet, for most Western consumers, it simply doesn't exist in their mental map of "fine pearls." That gap didn't happen by accident. It happened because of decades of limited trade access and geopolitical distance that kept Chinese pearl cultivation — which was producing extraordinary things — largely invisible to Western buyers. By the time those barriers began to ease, other pearl origins had already claimed the international stage.

The result is a whole generation of buyers who learned to associate "quality" with certain origins and "cheap" with China — an association that has very little to do with the pearls themselves.

What Chinese Freshwater Pearls Actually Look Like Today

Modern Chinese freshwater pearls are not your grandmother's rice-shaped beads. Today's cultivation techniques — refined over decades by farming families in Zhejiang and Jiangxi provinces — produce pearls with thick nacre, strong luster, and a range of shapes from perfectly round to the gloriously organic baroque forms I use in many of my Mooncord Studio pieces.

Freshwater pearl farming in Shanxiahu, Zhuji, Zhejiang Province, one of China’s most important pearl-producing regions. Beneath the rows of floating buoys, pearl mussels are cultivated in freshwater ponds.

And then there's the color.

This is where freshwater pearls do something no other pearl can match. White, yes — but not just white. Warm white, cool white, soft champagne, blush pink, peach, tangerine, lavender, and a deep, almost otherworldly purple that stops people in their tracks. This color range comes naturally from the mollusks themselves, without treatment. It is one of the most underappreciated things about freshwater pearls — and it is a world that most pearl buyers never even knew existed.

So Why Aren't More People Talking About This?

Partly history. Partly politics. Partly because the pearl industry, like many industries, rewards whoever got there first with the loudest voice.

But also — and this is the part I think about a lot — because there haven't been enough people telling this story from the inside.

I started Mooncord Studio because I love pearls. But I also started it because I wanted to make beautiful things from materials I believe in. Chinese freshwater pearls are part of my culture, part of a craft tradition that goes back thousands of years, and part of what I think is one of the best-kept secrets in jewelry.

Now you know.

Curious what freshwater pearls can really look like? Browse the pearls at Mooncord Studio — each piece is handmade with freshwater pearls I've personally selected.