Lucky Thai couple finds 1 million baht pearl in their dinner

It wasn’t so much the world’s your oyster for a young Thai couple but more a slow and steady pace winning the race after they found a rare pearl worth over 1 million baht inside a snail while eating seafood at a local BBQ restaurant.

Sittidate Chaiwan was celebrating the birthday of his girlfriend, 27 year old Patjariya Gatip, on Thursday, August 11, when she almost swallowed an expensive Melo pearl at a restaurant in the northern province of Payao.

Sittidate revealed Patjariya was eating grilled spotted Babylon snails when chewed on something very hard. She spat it out to discover a round orange stone that looked like a pearl.

A friend who was dining with the couple joked that they might be millionaires as the stone looked similar to a Melo pearl.

Sittidate searched the Internet for more information on the stone and was shocked to discover that real Melo pearls cost over 1 million baht.

The 26 year old sent the precious stone to get tested at Chiangmai Testing Laboratory on August 19. The laboratory later confirmed to him that the stone was indeed a real Melo pearl.

The excited boyfriend immediately announced that anyone interested in buying the pearl can contact him via his Facebook account, Pound in’Dy. His girlfriend, Patjariya, hopes this will be the end of her money problems and says she will use the sale money to pay off her family’s debt.

A Melo pearl has a natural pastel orange colour and it comes from a very large sea snail called Melo Melo or Indian volute. It is one of the rarest and most expensive pearls because it can be found only in one in a thousand snail shells.

A Melo pearl can be found in the seas around only four countries, Myanmar in the Andaman Sea, and the Bay of Bengal, Vietnam in the South China Sea, Thailand in the Andaman Sea, and the Gulf of Thailand, and Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand.

The price of one Melo pearl is generally worth about US$200,000 to US$250,000 or between 6 to 7.5 million baht. Melo pearls have different shades from light yellow to orange, the orange pearl is the most expensive.

SOURCE: Khaosod | Thairath | Sanook | Amarin TV