Almost everything about the Star of the South is documented in detail. Its rough weight is recorded, its cut is recorded, its journey through the hands of dealers is recorded, and so is the moment Halphen and Associates sold it to Malhar Rao, the Gaekwar of Baroda, for whom it became a piece of princely regalia in India. The one thing the record handles carelessly is the woman. She appears in the accounts as an enslaved woman who found a diamond, sometimes with a name attached, more often without, and the freedom she received is described as a reward for honesty rather than as what it plainly was - the price of a fortune she was not permitted to keep. She had been working the alluvial gravels of the Bagagem because she had no choice about it. Then she was free, with a pension, and the historical record loses interest in her entirely.

The town's other famous resident arrived the same year the diamond was found. Ana Jacinta de Sao Jose - known throughout Brazil as Dona Beija, or Dona Beja - was born in 1800 and abducted at fifteen by Joaquim Inacio Silveira da Mota, the crown's ombudsman for the district; her grandfather was killed during the abduction. She spent two years in Paracatu as his companion. Returning to Araxa to find herself socially finished, she built her own establishment, her own money, and eventually her own influence in a society that offered a woman in her position none of the three. In 1853 she left Araxa for Bagagem with her daughter, bought into the diamond trade, and prospered again. She died here on December 20, 1873, of nephritis, and was buried in the old cemetery. In June 2011, excavation for a fountain turned up a coffin trimmed with zinc that is believed to be hers. Brazil met her again in 1986, when a telenovela starring Maite Proenca made her a household name.

The settlement predates both of them. A bandeirante named Joao Leite da Silva Ortiz established it in 1772 during one of his expeditions toward Goias, and it became a municipality in 1856, three years after the great diamond. What makes Estrela do Sul unusual today is what did not happen: the wave of demolition and rebuilding that swept through the rest of the Triangulo Mineiro during the twentieth century largely passed it by. This is the only city in the region that still preserves houses from the Brazilian colonial period, standing in the streets where they were built. The town was not widely recognized as a historical site until after 1984, when three brothers named Rosa - a teacher, a filmmaker, and a journalist - set about bringing it to national attention. In 1997 one of them, Pedro Divio Rosa, published a book on Dona Beija.

Estrela do Sul sits at 713 meters on the Alto Paranaiba, on the shoreline of the Emborcacao Reservoir, the lake formed when the Paranaiba River was dammed. The water is a relatively recent arrival in a landscape whose defining feature used to be the diamond gravels of the Bagagem. MG-223 connects the town south to BR-365; Monte Carmelo is 28 kilometers off, Araguari 65, Uberlandia 90, and Belo Horizonte a long 514. Grupiara and Cascalho Rico lie north - the second of those names means Rich Gravel, which tells you what people were doing there too.

Around 8,000 people live in the municipality's 820 square kilometers now, and the economy has nothing to do with stones. Cattle dominate: 55,000 head across 492 rural establishments occupying 103,000 hectares, of which a striking 55,000 hectares remain woodland rather than pasture or planting. Coffee covers 2,200 hectares, corn 4,500, soybeans 4,000. There were 726 automobiles in the whole municipality in 2007, about one for every ten residents, and a single bank branch in town. The Star of the South is in India. Dona Beija is under the plaza. The colonial houses are still on the street, which is more than most towns in the Triangulo can say.