A large, excellent, pillow-shaped Vesuvianite from Hebei Province in China. This exceptional single crystal has superb luster, is translucent to gemmy, and has a rich, sparkly root beer color. The best ones for luster and color seem to have come out in the late 1990s, which would explain Kay's very high specimen number of 12,800 among the later minerals she added to the collection. These are rare, especially in this quality. According to Kay's label, she obtained this from a Chinese dealer at one of the Los Angeles area shows in Pomona. The "lady dealer" told her it was traded out of the Chinese National Museum of Natural History. Given the time and place, and that there were few women involved in the trade at the time, I would bet this dealer was Miao Yang, an early-to-market Chinese dealer who lived in LA and travelled freely back and forth, and had many good unusual finds in the 1990s (so what she told Kay about the origin of the piece is highly believable to me).