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This GIA Field Expedition (FE54) took place in June 2014. In this video, you’ll venture into Vietnam’s gem-rich interior and, along with GIA Field Gemologist Vincent Pardieu and his team, climb Luc Yen’s treacherous limestone mountains in search of the region’s gems. You’ll also visit the bustling gem markets of Luc Yen town and skim the waters off Ha Long Bay to visit an akoya pearl farm. Pardieu points out that the annual expedition to Vietnam isn’t just a good occasion to collect new reference samples and witness mining and trading activity. It also serves to train and evaluate young gemologists hoping to join the Bangkok GIA Field Gemology department. Luc Yen is a mountainous district located in the north of Vietnam’s Yen Bai province. It’s approximately 155 miles (250 km) northwest of Vietnam’s capital city, Hanoi, about a 4- to 5-hour journey by road. Its main city, Yen The, is also known as Luc Yen. Once a sleepy provincial area, Luc Yen was the scene of a rich discovery of ruby, sapphire, and spinel in 1987. Yen The is still Vietnam’s premier gem trading district, although the activity is much reduced since the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s. Luc Yen is an area of rugged beauty—steep, almost conical limestone mountains rise out of lush, fertile plains. This is karst topography, formed when rainfall dissolved soluble rocks like limestone and created underground drainage systems with sinkholes and caves. These features—combined with the hot climate and abundant vegetation—make it exhausting for the GIA team to reach the mines, where miners recover ruby, sapphire, and spinel from primary and secondary deposits using small-scale artisanal methods...