The Most Famous Diamonds in History: Hope, Cullinan, Koh-i-Noor and More

Ask any gemmologist to name the most famous diamonds in history and the same five names come back almost every time: the Cullinan, the Hope Diamond, the Koh-i-Noor, the Regent and the Orlov. Between them they have crowned kings and empresses, survived a revolution, inspired an entirely invented curse, and sparked a repatriation debate that is still running in 2026. What follows is each stone's documented history, carats and dates included, with the legends honestly labelled as legends. Famous diamonds attract exaggeration the way they attract light, and we think the verified stories are better than the embroidered ones anyway.

The five, at a glance:

The Cullinan: the largest gem diamond ever found

On 26 January 1905, at the Premier Mine near Pretoria in what is now South Africa, the mine's surface manager Frederick Wells noticed something glinting in the wall of the pit. What he prised out weighed 3,106 carats — roughly the size of a human fist — and it remains the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever discovered. It was named after the mine's chairman, Sir Thomas Cullinan, and in 1907 the Transvaal government purchased it and presented it to King Edward VII.

Getting it to London produced one of the great security stories in diamond history. According to widely repeated accounts, a heavily guarded decoy travelled by steamship while the real stone was quietly sent in the ordinary registered post. In 1908 the Asscher brothers of Amsterdam took on the terrifying job of cleaving it; Joseph Asscher's steel blade reportedly snapped on the first attempt before the stone finally split cleanly. The rough eventually yielded nine major diamonds and 96 smaller ones. The greatest of them, Cullinan I — the 530.2-carat Great Star of Africa, still the largest colourless cut diamond in the world — was set into the Sovereign's Sceptre with Cross in 1910. Cullinan II, at 317.4 carats, sits in the front of the Imperial State Crown. Both are still used in British coronations today.

The Hope Diamond: a curse invented to sell a stone

The Hope Diamond is a 45.52-carat deep greyish-blue diamond, and it owes its colour to trace atoms of boron caught in its crystal lattice as it formed. It has one genuinely eerie property: after exposure to ultraviolet light, it phosphoresces a smouldering red-orange in the dark. That is chemistry, not a curse — though it has not helped the stone's reputation.

Its paper trail begins with the French merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who brought a large rough blue diamond back from India's Golconda region and sold it to Louis XIV in 1668. Recut into the roughly 69-carat "French Blue", it was stolen in September 1792 when thieves raided the royal storehouse during the French Revolution. A blue diamond of suspiciously similar character surfaced in London in 1812 and later took its name from the Hope banking family.

And the famous curse? We can be plain about this: it is marketing. The tale of a stone plucked from the eye of a temple idol has no historical foundation, and the curse narrative was pumped up by newspapers in the early 1900s and then leaned on by the jeweller Pierre Cartier, who used the frisson of doom to help sell the diamond to the American heiress Evalyn Walsh McLean in 1911. Harry Winston bought her collection in 1949 and donated the stone to the Smithsonian in 1958 — famously dispatching one of the most valuable objects on Earth by registered post. Millions of visitors see it in Washington every year, uncursed.

The Koh-i-Noor: the diamond four nations still claim

The Koh-i-Noor — Persian for "Mountain of Light" — is a 105.6-carat diamond of Indian origin, and it is the most contested gem in the world. Its early history is genuinely murky; the first solid records place it in the aftermath of 1739, when Nader Shah of Iran sacked Delhi and carried off the Mughal treasury, including the fabled Peacock Throne. The diamond later passed to the Durrani rulers of Afghanistan and, in 1813, to Maharaja Ranjit Singh of the Sikh Empire in Punjab.

After the Anglo-Sikh Wars, the 1849 Treaty of Lahore required the ten-year-old Maharaja Duleep Singh to surrender the Koh-i-Noor to the Queen of England, and it was presented to Queen Victoria in 1850. When crowds saw it at the Great Exhibition of 1851 many found the old Indian cut disappointingly dull, so in 1852 the Crown Jewellers, Garrard, recut it from about 186 carats to today's 105.6 — brighter, but nearly half the stone gone. Since 1937 it has been set in the crown made for Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.

India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan have all laid claim to the diamond at various times, reflecting the many hands it passed through; the British government maintains that the 1849 treaty made the transfer legal. We will not pretend to adjudicate that here. But we think honesty requires saying that this is a stone whose history includes conquest and the signature of a child, and the strength of feeling around it is understandable. It is perhaps telling that at the 2023 coronation, Queen Camilla chose a crown without it.

The Regent and the Orlov: stones that outlived empires

The Regent Diamond was found around 1698 in the Golconda mining region of India — a rough of roughly 410 carats, wrapped in a grim and probably embellished legend about an enslaved miner who smuggled it out and was betrayed. What is documented is that Thomas Pitt, the British governor of Madras, acquired it, had it cut in London into a superb cushion of about 140.6 carats, and in 1717 sold it to Philippe d'Orléans, Regent of France — hence the name. It sat in the coronation crown of Louis XV, was stolen in the same 1792 revolutionary raid as the French Blue but recovered, and was later mounted by Napoleon in the hilt of his ceremonial sword. For the past two centuries its home has been the Louvre — and in the museum's headline-making robbery of October 2025, thieves took eight pieces of the French crown jewels from the Galerie d'Apollon in under eight minutes yet left the Regent untouched, reportedly because a stone that famous is impossible to sell. As we write, the surviving jewels are in secure storage while the Louvre prepares a new strongroom gallery for them.

The Orlov is stranger still: roughly 189.6 carats, shaped like half a hen's egg and retaining an old Indian rose-style cut, with its own unproven temple-idol legend. Its documented moment is wonderfully human. In 1774 Count Grigory Orlov, a former favourite of Catherine the Great, presented her with the diamond in the hope of winning back her affection. Catherine accepted the stone, named it after him, and had it mounted at the top of the Russian Imperial Sceptre — and did not take him back. It remains in the Diamond Fund at the Kremlin in Moscow.

What actually makes a diamond famous

Strip away the sceptres and every one of these stones is the same material as the diamond in any engagement ring: carbon atoms locked in a lattice, whether it crystallised in the earth a billion years ago or grew in a laboratory over a few weeks. What made the Cullinan, the Hope and the Koh-i-Noor famous was never chemistry. It was the humans — the manager who spotted a glint in a mine wall, the jeweller who invented a curse, the boy king who signed a treaty, the count who gambled a fortune on lost love. A diamond becomes famous when a story attaches to it and refuses to let go.

There is a quieter version of the same idea in modern diamond buying. Where legend once gave a stone its identity, today a laboratory report does: an IGI certificate records a diamond's exact weight, colour and cut, tying the stone to its own verified history from the moment it is graded.

At Signora we will never handle a 3,106-carat rough, and we are at peace with that. What we do believe is that every diamond's real fame begins the day it is given. Each of our lab-grown diamonds is IGI-certified with the report number laser-inscribed on its girdle, and every piece is made to order in our workshops in Surat, India — so the story your stone carries, from its first day, is entirely yours. If you are curious how modern stones compare to the mined diamonds of legend, our guide to lab-grown versus natural diamonds is a good place to wander next.