On most days the Jewel House in the Tower of London is packed with tourists gawking at the fabled British Crown Jewels. The most infamous jewel of them all, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, is prominently set in the Crown of Elizabeth the Queen Mother, kept safe behind bulletproof glass. Approximately 106 carats, the Queen Mother was the last royal to sport the diamond at her daughter’s coronation in 1953, and one last time during an appearance on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 1960. There is a good reason for this. The famous diamond, whose name means “mountain of light,” is considered cursed and highly controversial.
Over the years India, Pakistan and even the Taliban have claimed ownership of the Koh-i-Noor. Despite their superior claims, India’s requests to return the stone have fallen on deaf ears. When King Charles III was preparing for his coronation in 2023, calls for the return of the diamond were renewed yet again. It was not, but at least Queen Camilla had the good sense not to wear it in her coronation crown. In April of 2026, NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was asked what he would say to King Charles on his upcoming visit to the city. “If I was to speak to the king separately,” he said. “I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.”
Long said to bring ruin on the male rulers who owned it, the Koh-i-Noor has also been shunned by female royals in recent decades. For the Koh-i-Noor is not only supposedly cursed, it is also a symbol of the United Kingdom’s brutal colonial reign in India. Over the centuries, the diamond has attracted many legends. Some say it was discovered by the god Krishna himself. But the mysterious diamond’s true journey is crazier than any tale. “It’s a perfectly scripted Game of Thrones-style epic,” historian William Dalrymple told Smithsonian Magazine. “All the romance, all the blood, all the gore, all the bling.”
According to Dalrymple and Anita Anand, authors of Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond, the true origins of the diamond are lost to time. Until 1725, India was the world’s lone source of diamonds, and the stone, once weighing over 190 carats, was no doubt discovered in one of the country’s famous mines.
The definitive appearance of the diamond in a written record is in 1628. A gemstone-covered throne (said to cost twice as much as the construction of the Taj Mahal) was built for himself by the 17th century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan. It was supposedly inspired by the legendary throne of Solomon. “An octagon, shaped like a European hat, with circular brim, had its sides and canopy gilded and studded with jewels,” an eyewitness recounts in the next written record of the Koh-i-Noor during the 1740s, per Dalrymple and Anand. “On top of this was placed a peacock made of emeralds and rubies; on to its head was attached a diamond the size of a hen’s egg, known as the Koh-i-Noor–the Mountain of Light, whose price no one but God Himself could know!”
Those who sat on the Mughal’s Peacock Throne tended to die horrific deaths. “Three emperors had been murdered; one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle; the mother of the third was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. A fourth was strangled and thrown down the stairs,” Dalrymple and Anand write.
In 1738-39, the Persian ruler Nader Shah defeated the Mughals in Delhi and reset the Koh-i-Noor into an armband. But he did not enjoy his plunder for long. After an assassination attempt in 1741, Nader was convinced his son was behind it and had him blinded. After his son’s eyes were brought to him on a platter, he began to wail, “What is a father? What is a son?” He then descended into madness, launched a brutal killing spree and was finally murdered by his personal guard in 1747.
Nader’s empire quickly disintegrated into chaos. In the melee the Koh-i-Noor was smuggled to the Persian general Ahmad Khan Abdali by a devoted harem member. One of Nader’s grandsons, Shah Rukh, was tortured by a greedy court eunuch named Agha Muhammad to force him to reveal the location of the invaluable diamond. “Frustrated in his designs, Agha Muhammad finally had Shah Rukh tied to a chair, and his head shaved. A crown of thick paste was built upon his bald pate,” Dalrymple and Anand write. “Then in a ghoulish coronation ceremony, reminiscent of an episode of Game of Thrones, Agha Muhammad personally poured a jug of molten lead into the crown.”
But the Agha never learned the location of the Koh-i-Noor. It was safely in the possession of Ahmad KhanAbdali (later known as Ahmad Shah Durrani), regarded as the founder of modern Afghanistan. But like many owners of the Koi-i-Noor, Ahmad’s life would not be easy. A form of tumor slowly ate his face. Although he covered it with a diamond-encrusted face piece, it grew so large and infected maggots would fall from his nose into his mouth.
His descendants fared no better, and chaos reigned in what is now Afghanistan. One of his sons hid the gem in the crack of his cell wall before he was blinded and deposed. Ahmad’s grandson Shah Shuja discovered the Koi-i-Noor years later, being used by a clueless mullah as a paperweight. He proudly wore it in an armband, a symbol of his monarchal power.
But the clever and wily ruler of the Sikh Kingdom of Punjab, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was obsessed with bringing the Koh-i-Noor back to India. When Shuja was usurped in Afghanistan by a rival brother, Shuja’s wife, Wa’fa Begum, fled to Lahore for safety. Ranjit Singh seized the opportunity, holding the queen while plotting to extract the legendary diamond from the exiled royal family. He used every bullying tactic he could to get her to relinquish the stone. Wa’fa Begum taunted Singh’s attempts and claimed that if he “continued his dishonorable demands, she would pound the diamond into mortar, and first administer it to her daughters, and those under her protection, and then swallow it herself.”
Wa’fa Begum finally agreed to give Singh the stone, only if he freed her husband. Desperate for the mythical gem, Singh agreed and he rescued Shuja in 1813 and took him back to Lahore. But Shuja was reluctant to part with the fabled diamond, so Singh put him under house arrest and ordered his guards to torture his son. “Ranjit Singh coveted the Koh-i-Noor diamond beyond anything else in this world, and broke all the laws of hospitality in order to get possession of it,” one chronicler wrote. Shuja could not bear seeing his son hurt and finally agreed to relinquish the diamond, but only if he was paid and guaranteed a treaty of friendship. Singh agreed and on June 1, 1813, the Koh-i-Noor was his. “Good luck,” Shuja said wryly, “for he who has possessed it, has obtained it by overpowering his enemies.”
Elated, Singh placed the gem on his turban and paraded it through the streets of Lahore for all his subjects to see. He then set it in an armband and obsessed about its safety. A caravan of forty camels transported the jewel on journeys. It was otherwise locked in a treasury. “It was not just that Ranjit Singh liked diamonds and respected the stone’s vast monetary value; the gem seems to have held a far greater symbolism for him,” write Anand and Dalrymple. “He had won back from the Afghan Durrani dynasty almost all the Indian lands they had seized.”
In 1839 Singh died and Punjab quickly fell apart. “In the four years that followed Ranjit Singh’s death, Punjab had lost three maharajas, two crown princes, one dowager queen and numerous aristocrats,” Anand and Dalrymple write. “By December 1843, the last man standing was no man at all, but a tiny doe-eyed child by the name of Duleep Singh.”
Duleep was the child of Singh and Rani Jindan, a beautiful and brave woman. His reign was tumultuous and brief, as he was merely a child when he inherited the throne. The British East India Company saw his weak rule as a perfect time to finally take over his valuable kingdom. Duleep, often seen with the heavy Koh-i-Noor strapped to his arm, witnessed trauma after trauma: His uncle was hacked to death in front of him, his mother ripped from him, and his kingdom invaded by the British. Following a decisive victory at the Battle of Gujrat on February 21, the British East India Company finally defeated the Sikhs for good. The10-year-old Duleep was forced to sign the Treaty of Lahore, where he signed away his sovereignty and the Koh-i-Noor. The Sikh Kingdom of Punjab was no more.
James, Lord Dalhousie, the arrogant and ruthless Governor General of British India, who had long coveted the riches of Punjab and the Koh-i-Noor, was triumphant. “I had now ‘caught my hare,’” he remembered.
With his mother thrown in jail, Duleep was placed with Dr. John Spencer Login, a kindly Scottish doctor, 600 miles away at the Fatehgarh Hill Fort. Although Login and his wife tried to make up for all that had been stolen from Duleep , their efforts were futile. At his first birthday party after his banishment the boy was said to have “innocently remarked that on his last birthday he had worn the Koh-i-Noor on his arm.”
In 1850, the diamond was sent to England from Bombay aboard the HMS Medea. Lord Dalhousie personally escorted the diamond from Lahore to Bombay hidden under his clothes and handed it over to his trusted emissaries. The journey by sea was treacherous, and the men who knew about the Koh-i-Noor feared the curse of the stone had turned its wrath on them. Meanwhile in England, Queen Victoria fretted about receiving a gemstone obtained in such an unsavory way, and worried about the condition of Duleep.
The British press had no such qualms. “Are we really to see the Mountain of Light?... is the renowned Koh-i-Noor really on its way to England?” Lloyd’s Weekly asked breathlessly. “Is the Tower of London actually to possess such a treasure?”
The British public devoured stories of the tragic boy king and his fabled diamond, its lore printed across the country. But when it was finally presented to Queen Victoria, the oddly shaped, unfaceted stone did not impress her, and she still felt enormous guilt. “If H.M. thinks it brings bad luck, let her give it back to me,” Dalhousie scoffed. “I will take it and its ill-luck on speculation.”
Unsurprisingly, the Queen managed to overcome her qualms. With much fanfare the Koh-i-Noor was unveiled to the British public at the famous 1851 Great Exposition in London. But the public was sorely disappointed, because in its natural state the gem was not what they expected and seemed little more than an oddly shaped lump of glass. Furious, Prince Albert had the entire exhibition room redesigned with mirrors and special lighting. After it was reinstalled, the sparkling gem became the must-see exhibit of the exposition.
After the exhibition was over, Prince Albert decided to have the Koh-i-Noor recut in the western style. Though the operation took place at the workshop of the Crown Jeweller, Garrard & Company, British artisans lacked the requisite skill, prompting the Prince to hire master cutters from Amsterdam’s Royal Coster Diamonds. They carved 37-facets both on top and underneath, in the process cutting away half the diamond’s weight. Meanwhile, according to Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World's Most Infamous Diamond, popular culture went Koh-i-Noor–crazy, with racing horses named after it and the early mystery The Moonstone based on its alleged curse.
But the real tragedy of the diamond was the life of Duleep Singh, the little king. In 1854, Duleep traveled to England where he was presented to Queen Victoria. A courtly, beautiful little boy, he won the guilty Queen’s heart and practically became a member of her family. “He is extremely handsome and speaks English perfectly, and has a pretty, graceful and dignified manner. He was beautifully dressed and covered with diamonds,” she wrote. “I always feel so much for these poor deposed Indian Princes.”
According to Dalrymple and Anand, the two spent hours sketching each other, and Duleep played with the royal children, becoming good friends with Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales. A gentle child, he also endeared himself to Victoria by the kindness he showed to her youngest son, Leopold, who suffered from hemophilia.
After the Koh-i-Noor was recut, Victoria decided to show it to her little friend. Intrigued, Duleep took the unrecognizable diamond into his hand, holding it up to the light. “For all his air of polite interest and curiosity, there was a passion of repressed emotion in his face,” wrote his foster mother Lena Login. “Evident, I think, to Her Majesty, who watched him with sympathy not unmixed with anxiety... Time seemed to slow, as the awkwardness in the room grew.” Finally he bowed and gave it to the queen. “It is to me, Ma’am, the greatest pleasure thus to have the opportunity, as a loyal subject, of myself tendering to my Sovereign the Koh-i-Noor.”
At that moment any guilt Queen Victoria had about the stone melted away. She was soon sporting it in a brooch that was later made detachable to wear in a circlet.But everything changed in 1861. That year, his long-suffering mother, Rani Jindan, was allowed to visit Duleep in England. After years of abuse, she was horribly aged and almost blind and began to constantly remind Duleep of his stolen inheritance, and he began to realize all that had been taken from him, particularly the Koh-i-Noor.
Rani Jindan died in 1863, but Duleep’s life would never be the same. He was given the grand estate of Elveden in Suffolk and married a German-Abyssian teenager named Bamba Müller. The couple had seven children (and he had two more with his second wife Ada Douglas Wetherill.) But the tortured Duleep spent little time with them, turning to spending, drinking and women. In 1877, the British government took away his pension and he began to fight for the return of the Koh-i-Noor. He died, broke and alone, in a cheap Parisian hotel in 1893. He was only 55.
In the press, Duleep was seen as another victim of the cursed Koh-i-Noor, instead of the British Empire. His death also encouraged Queen Victoria to leave the stone not to her son, the new Edward VII, but his wife Queen Alexandra, since the curse was thought to only affect male rulers. Alexandra would wear the jewel in her coronation crown, as would her successors Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
Despite other colonial loot being returned over the decades, the diamond men literally died for still sits in the Jewel House in the Tower of London. “What people have got to realise is the Koh-i-Noor is still a hugely emotional issue,” Dalrymple recently told The Guardian. “On to this one little stone, sitting in a glass cabinet in London, has been projected all the pain that South Asia feels about colonialism.”
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