Yesterday a rare 5.16 carat blue diamond was sold at auction in Hong Kong for $6.4 million, half a million more than the top price that Sotheby’s estimated. Terry Chu, deputy head of Sotheby’s jewellery department for China and Southeast Asia, said:

There have been a lot of new diamond buyers from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and elsewhere in the region. I think after the financial crisis, the Asian buyers realized that the prices of diamond are relatively stable compared to other types of auction items.

It’s interesting that Asian buyers are so interested in diamonds (though it should be noted that the eventual buyer was Moussaieff Jewellers of London) — we’ve seen other markets beginning to heat up in Asia. This auction and the auctions for other diamonds from the De Beers Millennium Collection that will surely follow are yet more signs that economic recovery is underway.

When something is scare and unique enough, people will pay a premium for it, whether there’s a recession on or not. This was eminently clear with the recent sale of the ‘Star of Josephine’, the 7.03 carat flawless blue diamond that sold at auction for £6.2 million earlier this month. It was the highest ever price paid per carat for a diamond at auction according to Sotheby’s. The buyer, Hong Kong property developer Joseph Lau Luen-Hung, named the diamond after purchasing it.

One for the ‘too-good-to-be-true’ file: several weeks ago we mentioned the discovery of an unpolished diamond in the North-West Province of South Africa that was said to be twice the size of the Cullinan diamond. Turns out it’s a hoax: The UK’s Guardian reports that Brett Jolly, a British property developer, was apparently duped by former business colleagues who were trying to get him to buy the land where the ‘diamond’ was found. Upon Jolly’s arrival at the mine, they produced something that was clearly plastic and didn’t or wouldn’t use the testing machine properly on this ‘diamond’ to accurately test it. Shame.

In actual diamond news, Sotheby’s recently held an auction in Hong Kong that sold a 6.04 carat internally flawless ‘fancy vivid blue’ diamond for $7.98 million. That’s a price of $1.32 million per carat, about 10 times the amount that white diamonds of this caliber would sell for, and well above the previous record set by ‘Hancock Red,’ a red diamond that sold for $926,000 per carat 20 years ago.

The Diamond Vues blog notes that Sotheby’s is also going to auction off a nearly perfect 84.37 carat white diamond on November 14 in Geneva. It’s expected to fetch $15 million.

And so demand for exceptional diamonds continues to rise.