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You are looking straight down into a moonstone mine shaft. Sri Lanka is the only place in the world where you'll find blue moonstones. This shaft is dug 45 meters down to start. Then miners climb down and dig horizontal shafts in all directions and haul up whatever they find there. They then fill in the vertical shaft a few meters and do the same. The raw material they find is then sorted, selected, and ground down until you get a beautiful semi-precious gem. This process goes back even before the early colonists arrived. Now the mining is all controlled by the Sri Lankan government. And the results, as you can see, can be magnificent.