Hong Kong

Shenzhen visitor at Hong Kong jewellery fair finds and returns HK$250m bag of diamonds

Buyers browse jewellery pieces at the Jewellery & Gem Fair in Hong Kong. Photo: Xinhua

It’s not every day that someone in Hong Kong finds a bag of diamonds worth HK$250 million lying around. Even more rare is someone who would willingly return it.

But mainland tourist Fu Zhuli did just that during a trip to a local jewellery fair at the weekend.

On Sunday, the woman from Shenzhen was strolling through the exhibition hall of the Hong Kong Jewellery & Gem Fair at the Convention and Exhibition Centre when she decided to take a short break.

“I went to the café to take a rest and have some chocolate ice-cream. I saw two foreigners chatting…after a while, they left – empty-handed. After a while, when the cleaners came to take the rubbish out, I realised there was a black bag at the foot of their table,” Fu told the Shenzhen Daily.

Fu Zhuli. Photo: Screenshot via Shenzhen Daily

Fu said she could recognise their faces and tell from their accents that the foreigners were from Israel and possibily from the Israeli pavillion in the hall. She went over to pick up the bag and upon opening it, was shocked to find a trove of “good quality, soy-bean-sized roughs".

Fu, a jewellery enthusiast, estimated the price of each diamond at about 400,000 yuan to 800,000 yuan (HK$500,000 to HK$1 million) and the total parcel of gems worth at least 200 million yuan. The bag weighed about 3kg.

None of the figures she stated could be confirmed.

After Fu sat at the table “guarding the bag” and thinking of what to do for two hours, one of the young foreigners came running back into the café.

“The shirt on his back was soaked with sweat, and his face was pale. He rushed in and saw the bag with me and leaned forward, uttered some incoherent words and kept bowing and saying ‘thank you’ in Putonghua,” she recounted. “I told him off for being so careless and leaving something so precious behind.”

Asked whether she had ever thought of taking the bag, Fu said: “No, I felt I was lucky enough to have seen those nice diamonds. You know, women love jewellery.” She said that she was a Christian and that her husband, who works in the Shenzhen police force, had told her to report the finding to police immediately. She admitted that some of her friends had told her to keep the bag.

“I never thought of doing that, I just felt like [the men] would come back to get it so I just sat there and waited,” Fu told the Shenzhen Daily. "I am a very honest, simple person and I believe in sincerity."

UBM Asia, the fair’s organiser, said they couldn't confirm the incident as neither Fu nor the bag’s owner had reported the case to them.

In April, a Hong Kong man returned a bag containing about HK$74,000 in cash to a relieved owner after it was apparently mistaken for rubbish and kicked out of a bus in Cheung Sha Wan.