Dubai: A walk through the Emirates NBD Pearl Museum in Dubai is unlike any other museum experience.
Housed on the 15th floor of the bank headquarters in Deira on Baniyas Road, by last count roughly Dh500 million worth of fine Gulf pearls are on display, testimony to the early pre-oil days when pearl trading made up 95 per cent of Dubai’s income.
One of the largest and finest collections of pearls in the world, the repository is the life’s work of the late Sultan Al Owais, the first chairman of the National Bank of Dubai, who gifted his treasured collection to the people to enjoy in perpetuity in the custodianship of its current guardians.
A walk through the museum greets visitors with a very old chart of shallow Gulf waters off Dubai marking each and every oyster bed known to pearl divers and traders in the pearl’s heyday. The room is filled with antique pearling equipment and suits used by adventurous divers who would rotate the harvesting of oyster beds for years to allow oysters to grow their precious treasures.
In the main exhibition room, Dubai’s pearling history comes alive as the white and rainbow-hued pearls reflect a dazzling array of light in their display cases — small, medium and large, the delicate treasure trove’s total weight is roughly 55 kgs making it one of the largest collections on the planet.
A third room in the tour educates visitors about the arrival of man-made cultured pearls mid-20th century leading to a less lucrative pearling industry in the Gulf.
In the last leg of the tour, the pearl museum houses an impressive array of ancient coins found in the UAE leading all of way up to modern paper currency and minted coins circulated in modern day.
The museum is open Sundays though Thursdays from 9am-3pm and is closed on Fridays and Saturday.
Access to the museum is granted by appointment only by contacting the museum operators.
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Visitors will not believe their eyes as they step into the main exhibition rooms where countless pearls of all sizes, qualities and colours are housed under high-security glass. Few visitors have ever been privy to such a large display of so many of the highly coveted pearls, said museum organisers.
