Tingo Tanca, a wholesale company dealing primarily with gemstones, was
founded in 1980. Physically based in Denmark, it was among the very
first in the business to have established a full-scale Internet
activity. By 1998, the complete range of its products had been made
available on the web.
In more than one respect, this undertaking—at the time a definite jump
into the unknown—put stronger demands on the company's standards of
accuracy. Pictures, sizes, shapes, descriptions, names, to mention only
these, had to be as nitpickingly truthful as possible—by no means a
frivolous task. In particular the company felt that it had a
responsibility to adhere to what the single gemstones actually were,
mineralogically speaking, or at least to a consensus agreed upon by
professionals, as opposed to what the fancies of self-styled gurus
wanted them to be for more or less avowable purposes.
In the course of time, Flat Stones
made of a wide variety of gemstones—which, ironically, had originally
made their way into the catalogue for no other reason than a shipping
mistake committed by a manufacturer—were to become synonymous with the
company's aim for quality. By late 2007, when the company's owners
thought of a more pleasurable way of spending their existence, they had
become true collector's items, sold worldwide.
The
links below are to the original pictures posted on Tingo Tanca's
website, rendered with varying degrees of aesthetic success, as both
the equipment used and image manipulation techniques were upgraded
throughout the years. They are approximately listed in alphabetical
order, the mineral's name appearing in bold. It should be kept in mind
that trade names are occasionally better known than any kind of
mineralogical designation, so the best way to find a specific stone is
to use the browser's search function (with the correct spelling,
obviously).
All pictures are in jpeg format and may be downloaded and used freely,
under the following conditions (specified in the files' IPTC tags and
Comments):
- The gemstone name associated with this file may not be changed or otherwise altered.
- The IPTC and Comments tag may not be deleted, changed or otherwise altered.
- These
files may not be uploaded to, nor used by, any of the websites
connected with the Wikimedia Foundation (broadly speaking known as
"Wikipedia")
