1660: French trader Jean-Baptiste Tavernier travels across India buying jewels. Near the legendary mines of Golconda, he purchases a diamond of intense blue colour weighing an astonishing 110.5 carats and promptly names it “The Tavernier Blue.” So begins the recorded history of the diamond that would one day be called “Hope.”

1668: Tavernier has an audience with Louis XIV at the Louvre and shows him 45 large, spectacular stones and 1,122 smaller ones, saving the Tavernier Blue for last. Louise buys them all, paying 220,000 livres ($1,760,000 today) for the Blue Diamond alone. It is now officially named “The Blue Diamond of the French Crown.”

1672-1673: The king’s jeweler spends over a year cutting and polishing the diamond, removing one third of its weight in the process. The forty-one cart piece cut from the stone has never been seen again.

1749: Louise XV has the Blue Diamond set into the newly created Order of the Golden Fleece, conceived by his mistress, Madam de Pompadour.

1789: Louise XVI and Marie Antoinette are taken under armed guard from Versailles to Paris, along with the Crown Jewels, including the Blue Diamond. None of them will ever return.

1791: The Crown Jewels are put on public display every Monday in the Garde-Meuble in Paris until the violence in the streets becomes too great and they are packed away.

1792: Six professional thieves break into the Garde-Meuble and steal the Crown Jewels and as much other royal loot as they can carry. Over the next several nights, up to fifty more thieves break in and help themselves to treasure. By the time the robberies are discovered, only 5,500 livres remains of the original 30 million livres of jewels and royal possessions. The Blue Diamond is smuggled from Le Havre to Dover.

1812: Twenty years and one day after the robbery of the Crown Jewels was reported to the National Assembly in Paris, the statue of limitations on prosecution for the theft expires. Miraculously, the Blue Diamond (at some point removed from the Order of the Golden Fleece and re-cut into its present round shape) resurfaces that very day in the possession of a London jeweler, Daniel Eliason.

1824: In London, Eliason sells the diamond to Philip Hope, a Dutch-born heir to a vast banking fortune. (His family funded America’s Louisiana Purchase.) It is the centrepiece of Hope’s magnificent jewel collection and is commonly called the Hope Diamond. Hope has it made into a brooch, and lends it to his beautiful sister-in-law, Louisa, the greatest London society hostess of her day.

1839: Hope dies, leaving contradictory wills dividing his estate among his three dissolute nephews. Ten years of bitter litigation over the diamond’s ownership ensues. Henry, the eldest nephew, ultimately gets the stone.

1851: As Deputy Chairman of London’s Great Exhibition, Henry Hope lends the diamond for display in the Crystal Palace.

1855: The diamond returns to Paris to be displayed in the Paris Exposition Universelle. Empress Eugenie admires it so much she persuades Napoleon III to have a copy made for her. (It has since disappeared.)

1861: Henrietta Hope (Henry’s daughter) is married to “Linky,” the debt-ridden Earl of Lincoln, eldest son of the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle. The marriage is annulled, allowing the Hope Diamond to pass on to their son who, by condition of his grandmother’s will, must change his last name to Hope, thus becoming Lord Henry Francis Hope Pelham-Clinton Hope.

1894: Lord Francis finds himself massively in debt, but he cannot legally sell the Hope Diamond because it is entailed to the family. He marries his mistress, popular showgirl May Yohe, the daughter of a saloon-keeper in Bethlehem, PA. (Although May hardly every – possibly never – wore the diamond, the rest of her life would centre on her fictional relationship to the stone.)

1901: After two years of intense litigation, Lord Francis (whose debt has reached an astonishing three million dollars) finally wins the right to sell the Hope Diamond. The coveted gem is sold to Simon Frankel of Joseph Frankel’s Sons, a New York City jeweler. He takes it by steamship to America. The New York Times headline on November 14 read, “Hope Diamond Coming Here.”

1909: Frankel sells the Hope to a French syndicate. A report of the sale in the London Times embellishes wildly on the stone’s history, claiming “its possession is the story of a long series of tragedies.” A famous curse is born.

1910: The Cartier Brothers buy the stone and sell it a few months later to unhappy, insecure, socialite Evalyn McLean. Her husband, Ned McLean, owns the Washington Post. She will wear the diamond almost every day for the rest of her life. When it isn’t around her neck, her dog sometimes wears it on his collar.

1949: Two years after Evalyn McLean’s death, all of her jewels are sold to Harry Winston for 1.1 million dollars. The collection, including the Hope, is sent to Winston’s New York City store via regular mail.

1958: On November 8, Harry Winston donates the Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, inspiring many others to donate to the museum’s formerly modest collection of jewels. A Winston employee takes the Hope by subway to the General Post Office and sends it, once again courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service, to Washington, D.C.

1997 to Present: The Smithsonian gives the Hope Diamond a magnificent new home as sole occupant of the Harry Winston Gallery, where it can still be seen every day. More than eight million people a year come from around the world to gaze into its dark blue depths.

2002: Hope: Adventures of a Diamond by Marian Fowler released by Random House Canada