I grew up knowing that Mogok rubies had traveled far. To auction houses in Geneva. To collections in Bangkok and Hong Kong. To the wrists and necks of people who would never know the valley they came from.

But there is one pair of hands I think about more than others.

Queen Elizabeth II wore rubies from Mogok, Burma, for most of her adult life. They sat on her head at state banquets. They were photographed alongside presidents and prime ministers. They are, by any measure, some of the most famous gemstones on earth.

And their story - how they got there, what they mean, and why this conversation is more relevant right now than ever - is one I feel in my bones.

How she got them

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Prince Philip. Among the wedding gifts she received that year was something extraordinary: 96 rubies, given to her by the people of Burma.

Ninety-six was not a random number. In Burmese tradition, rubies are protective stones - believed to shield their wearer from illness and misfortune. The Burmese counted 96 diseases that could befall the human body. So they gave her 96 rubies. One for each threat. A full suit of armor, made of earth and light.

It was an act of deep cultural sincerity. And it came from the same valley - Mogok - where my great-grandfather built his legacy as the Ruby King.

The rubies sat in their gift form for decades. Then in 1973, the Queen commissioned the royal jewelers Garrard & Co. to set them into a tiara - the Burmese Ruby Tiara. She designed it herself. The stones were set into a wreath of Tudor roses, gold at the center, diamonds forming the petals. Red and white. The old symbols of England, holding the red stones of Burma. She paired it with Queen Victoria's Crown Ruby Necklace for the grandest of occasions. She wore the suite as recently as 2019, at a state banquet at Buckingham Palace.

She wore it because she wanted to. Again and again, across decades. That is not the behavior of someone indifferent to what she had.

The harder history

I won't pretend the full story is simple.

Britain had been in Burma long before those rubies were wrapped and gifted. The Third Anglo-Burmese War in 1885 ended with the annexation of Upper Burma - including Mogok. The mines that had been worked by Burmese hands for over 800 years were leased by the colonial government to a British syndicate, the Burma Ruby Mines Company, which industrialized extraction and shipped the profits to London. My family's world - a world of deep craft, inherited knowledge, and community - was not asked for permission.

Burma gained independence from Britain in 1948. One year after the rubies were given.

So the question some people ask, "Were those stones taken, or were they given?" lives in that gap. In a history where the line between tribute and transaction, gift and extraction, is not always clean.

The Koh-i-Noor. And why this conversation isn't over.

Just days ago, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani - hours before meeting King Charles III at a ceremony in New York,  said publicly that if he had a private moment with the King, he would ask him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond to India.

The Koh-i-Noor. "Mountain of Light" in Persian. A 105-carat diamond - the size of a hen's egg - originally found in India's Golconda mines and passed through centuries of conquest: Mughal princes, Iranian warriors, Afghan rulers, Punjabi Maharajas. In 1849, following the Anglo-Sikh War, it was handed to the British under the terms of a punitive treaty signed by a ten-year-old boy, Duleep Singh, after his mother had been thrown in jail.

It was not a gift. It was a signature extracted from a child.

The diamond now sits in the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom. India has repeatedly sought its return, describing it as a valued piece of national heritage. Former British Prime Minister David Cameron said in 2013 that returning it was not "sensible." Mayor Mamdani met King Charles at the event. Whether he said anything privately, no one is saying.

I hold the Burmese ruby story with nuance. The 1947 gift was made freely, by an independent people offering their most sacred stone to a young queen on her wedding day. That sincerity was real. But it was made in the shadow of a century of extraction - a context that cannot be separated from the gesture, no matter how genuine the intention behind it.

The Koh-i-Noor has no such ambiguity. A treaty signed by a child under duress is not a transaction. It is a taking.

What Mayor Mamdani said out loud this week is something that people from colonized lands have felt for generations. That the most beautiful, most irreplaceable things the earth ever made - the rubies of Mogok, the diamonds of Golconda - were not discovered by empire. They were already known. Already loved. Already sacred. Empire just decided it had the right to take them.

What endures

After Queen Elizabeth passed in 2022, the Burmese Ruby Tiara passed to King Charles III. Queen Camilla wore it publicly for the first time at a state banquet in 2023, pairing it exactly as her predecessor had - with the Crown Ruby Necklace. The tradition continues.

Those 96 stones from Mogok are still traveling. Still being worn. Still carrying the intention of the people who chose them - protection, healing, permanence.

That is what a true ruby does. It doesn't just sit on a surface and shine. It holds a story across time, across borders, across the hands of everyone who ever believed it mattered.

At Jewel Creations NY, that belief is the foundation of everything we do. We carry stones from the same valley. The same red earth. The same ancient geology that produced the most celebrated rubies in human history.

The world is having this conversation right now - in New York City, in Buckingham Palace, in the press. About who owns the earth's rarest gifts. About what it means to hold something that was never really yours to take.

We've been living that question for generations.

When you wear one of our stones, you are not just wearing a gemstone. You are wearing a piece of a place the world has always come to find something irreplaceable - and a reminder that the most enduring things cannot be conquered. Only carried.