Purple Gold Part 3

Suite et Fin

Continued from Purple Gold Part 2

Nothing much happened for several years after the Great Tarnish Disaster of 1995, after which the Web came along, and with it the ability to search for old school friends and strange gold alloys at irregular intervals. One day, Google brought news: a Singapore-based company called Aspial (or Lee Hwa) had started making actual purple gold jewelry. The good news was that the gold looked fantastic. The bad news was that the designs were trite. Aspial’s website mentioned a Professor Loh Peng Chum who had discovered a way to make malleable purple gold. My thought was to have him make for me a very plain cabochon of purple gold. Some years later, I visited Singapore for my day job, so I contacted him at Singapore Polytechnic and eventually met him and his daughter Yang, who ran a jewelry shop.