The round banquet table and its lazy Susan are packed with dishes, laid out on a yellow silken cloth. Some hold great hunks of meat and poultry; others are filled with smaller slices, cubes and kernels, the various shapes of root vegetables, tubers, terrines and dumplings. A few wine glasses, a bottle of red wine and a clay vessel of Maotai liquor stand among the plates and bowls.
At first glance, it all looks rather appetising. But the dining table is enclosed in glass and stands in the foyer of the Ningxia Museum in Yinchuan in northern China. And on closer inspection, the feast isn’t actually edible, because every morsel on the table is some sort of rock: the chunks of layered pork belly, the buns in their bamboo steamer, the halved preserved duck eggs, the jellied terrine with its wavy opaque strips of pork skin. For years I’ve wanted to see a “strange stone banquet” (qishi yan), and now one stands before me.
The colours and textures of the stones, from bacon-pink to dark beef-jerky brown, their shapes and their textures, whether porous, layered, matte, rippled or pitted, are wildly expressive of different types of foods. It’s as if Henry Moore and Alberto Giacometti have collaborated on dinner. On top of the glass case, a sign announces the exhibit as a Man-Han Banquet (man han quanxi), a reference to the legendary Qing Dynasty feast said to have featured the finest delicacies of both the Han Chinese people and their Manchu overlords. Another sign advertises a local “strange stones market”. There’s a phone number you can call.
The Chinese affection for stones has a long history. Two thousand years ago, notable rocks were already being installed as features in Chinese gardens. By the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), connoisseurs appreciated the aesthetic qualities of stones and poets wrote about them. They might be towering forms suitable for a landscaped garden, like a mountain in miniature, or so small you could hold them in the palm of your hand.
During the subsequent Song Dynasty, literary types started to collect stones. They became one of the accoutrements of the Chinese scholar’s study, along with calligraphy brushes, seals and inkstones. (This is why Chinese collectors’ stones are known in English as “scholars’ rocks”.) These indoor stones were typically displayed on carved wooden stands. One scholar of the Song period, Du Wan, compiled a catalogue of stones that included everything from gemstones to entire cliffs, according to American academic John Hay, author of a 1985 book about Chinese rocks. He writes that the Song emperor Huizong was such a passionate collector that people have described him as a “petromaniac”.
Certain stones were highly sought after, such as dark, moody Lingbi rocks from Anhui Province, with their interesting contortions and pale seams, and porous limestone forms dragged up from Taihu Lake, as holey as Swiss cheese. There were some that rang like a bell when struck. In general, people went for stones with dramatic features: soaring vertical shapes, craggy overhangs or rippled surfaces that recalled mountain scenes. They were part of an aesthetic culture in which rocks featured in landscaped gardens, ink-and-watercolour paintings, ceramic design, poetry and domestic interiors.
Over time, writes another Chinese stone expert, art historian Robert D Mowry, taste in rocks mirrored broader cultural shifts: an early interest in muted, monochrome rocks and understated, monochrome ceramics shifting towards golden and turquoise stones and bright, polychrome porcelain in later dynasties.
Notionally at least, stones were “discovered” in nature, powerfully expressive in their raw state. In fact, their features were often enhanced by discreet carving, polishing and colouring. When supplies of Taihu stone ran dry, people carved similar holes and hollows into other limestone rocks, which were then submerged for long periods in the lake to give them the desired patina. Sometimes, in later periods, tiny trees or pavilions were carved into the surfaces of the stones.
Stones, like mountains, were thought to be reservoirs of cosmic energy, writes John Hay. Some were said to have special powers such as bringing sobriety to the drunk. The original title of the great Qing Dynasty novel Dream of Red Mansions was The Story of the Stone, a reference to its opening tale about a miraculous stone. Chinese scholars contemplated rocks as they might the majesty of nature or, alternatively, as a close friend. (One Song Dynasty petrophile, Mi Fu, was legendary for his eccentric intimacy with a stone.)
Stone-fancying declined during the 20th century but re-emerged, like so many aspects of Chinese culture, in the 1990s. People of a literary or artistic bent began to gravitate, once again, towards pursuits such as calligraphy, traditional music and stone collecting. If you drive around the outskirts of Chinese cities today, you may pass yards filled with towering stones for sale as garden ornaments, or strange stone shops, where owners and enthusiasts sit and drink tea amid thickets of notable rocks. In Dali in south-western Yunnan, you can pick up a slice of the local marble in a circular wooden frame, carefully selected so the dark streaks in the bluish-white stone resemble the brushstrokes of an inkwash landscape painting.
For westerners, the Chinese love of stones can be puzzling, because in general westerners prefer light-refracting, crystalline gemstones like diamonds and sapphires, the bling of the geological world. For a long time, “scholars’ rocks” were ignored by western art historians. How could a bunch of stones be worthy of serious aesthetic consideration? Yet for the Chinese, there was no division between art and nature, and a found object could be as worthy of contemplation as a painting. There was art in the connoisseur’s selection of strange stones, in the discovery of startling shapes amid the random rubble of nature, in spotting affinities between them and famous mountains or mythical creatures.
The American sculptor Richard Rosenblum recognised that Chinese connoisseurs’ rocks had much in common with modern abstract art. He assembled a stunning collection of stones from the late 1970s onwards, which were exhibited in New York in 1996. Flicking through the exhibition catalogue, it’s hard to avoid comparisons to artists such as Moore, Giacometti and Barbara Hepworth.
On the whole, Chinese scholars have always prized stones that hint at the sublime. Yet there is a more down-to-earth and humorous side to the Chinese love of stones which is not reflected in the Rosenblum collection.
In the National Palace Museum in Taipei, people queue to view one of the most famous treasures of the old Forbidden City: the “meat-shaped stone” (rouxing shi). In a glass case, upon a gold plinth patterned with swirling waves, rests an apparent cube of pork a few centimetres high. Its skin, tinted amber-brown as if by a long stewing in soy sauce and rice wine, is dotted with tiny pores and droops lusciously over the meat, all soft layers of pink flesh and paler fat. It really does look as though you could pop it into your mouth. A relic of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the pork is a chunk of chalcedony which an anonymous craftsman in the imperial workshops carefully pricked with pores and dyed to enhance its original pork-like qualities.
Unlike the grand rocks in the Rosenblum collection, the meat-shaped stone inspires stomach rumbles rather than awe and wonder. But while it may not be a serious rock, it’s one of the best-loved artefacts in the whole of China (rather as pork, while not as prestigious as shark’s fins or sea cucumbers, is the favourite meat of most Chinese people). After the Chinese revolution, when Nationalist functionaries entered the Forbidden City, which they were to raid of valuable artefacts before their flight to Taiwan in the 1940s, they found the meat-shaped stone on a shelf in the emperor’s bedroom. It was an intimate object, the aesthetic equivalent of granny’s cooking rather than a Michelin-starred dinner.
The meat-shaped stone is the best-known example of a whole genre of foodlike rocks which are enjoyed and collected by enthusiasts. In fact, the stones photographed for this article belong to me. Years ago, a Taiwanese friend gave me a hunk of agate “belly pork”, less refined than the imperial version but nonetheless naturally layered with pink and white beneath a golden skin. Only last year, in a village in Yunnan, I stumbled upon a stall covered in chunks of “pork”, with slabs of “bacon” hung up on the wall (the owner told me he selected chunks of local agate and then cut, carved and polished them to emphasise their fleshly qualities). In other places I’ve seen displayed huge stony hams.
The proliferation of these stones reflects a culture that delights in trompe l’oeil playfulness, whether in rock collecting or cuisine. As far back as the Tang Dynasty, an official entertained guests with lifelike replicas of meats made from plant foods — the precursor of a rich tradition of Buddhist vegetarian cooking in which vegetables pretend to be pork ribs, whole fish and hams. In 13th-century Hangzhou, you could taste imitation puffer fish or imitation river deer in city restaurants. Today, at a Sichuanese banquet, you may be served a chunk of fresh tofu in its whey that turns out to be made from finely minced chicken breast in a luxurious stock.
Effigies of food made from inedible materials are also a recurring theme in Chinese arts and crafts, from the clay peanuts scattered for amusement on a scholar’s tea table to Ai Weiwei’s porcelain sunflower seeds, which filled the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern gallery in London in 2010 and the adorable velour cabbages from Beijing on my London sofa.
Stones themselves have a marginal but notable role in Chinese cookery. Sometimes they are used as a cooking medium. A great pot filled with very hot stones may be brought to table and filled with hot soup, which boils instantly and can be used to cook slices of fish. Near Xi’an, the local equivalent of stone-baked pizza is “stone breads” (shizi mo), made by laying circles of seasoned dough over hot pebbles until they bake crisp and golden. The 12th-century poet Lin Hong included in his cookbook a recipe for “stone soup” (shizi geng), in which lichen-covered pebbles were boiled in spring water to give a flavour, he writes, “sweeter than snails”. More recently, a street-food craze for sucking stones after stir-frying them in spicy chilli oil attracted media attention worldwide.
A few months after coming across the spectacular strange stone banquet in Ningxia, I call the phone number on the sign, and end up speaking to its owner, self-declared stone-lover Xie Ning, at his home in Yinchuan. “You can have a conversation with a stone,” he says, “and discover in it all kinds of aesthetic beauty.” He tells me he was led into the world of rocks through a long-standing interest in art, and assembled his banquet through painstaking efforts over some 15 years. It includes about a thousand individual foodlike rocks. More than 80 per cent of them come from the desert sands of the Unesco-recognised Global Geopark of Alxa, not far from Yinchuan, in Inner Mongolia, known for its wealth of remarkable stones of many arresting forms and mineral colours — the legacy of prehistoric volcanic events, along with aeons of lashing by wind and sand.
“Nothing has been done to change the stones, to alter their shapes or hues,” he insists of the banquet collection, an assortment of agates and jaspers. “But there’s an art in discovering them, in viewing them from all angles to assess their colours, physical qualities and forms. Everyone’s eye is different. And while a single foodlike stone may be only mildly interesting, they have a dramatic impact when displayed together in the form of a banquet.”
Food-shaped stones are a niche interest because there are so few of them, relatively speaking, he says, but they’ve recently become more popular. And when it comes to more general rock collecting, these days there is a huge community of “stone friends” (shi you) across China and south-east Asia, many of whom flock to the occasional fairs Xie organises through his strange stone market in Yinchuan. Every Chinese province has a strange stone association. Now that China’s own reserves of notable rocks are largely exhausted, he says, Chinese collectors have gone global in their quest, pursuing stones in Africa and south-east Asia. Some are willing to pay the equivalent of millions of dollars for a really unique and distinctive stone.
Xie’s joy in stones is infectious, and he dreams of sharing it through an exhibition of his banquet abroad. He encourages me to open my eyes to the world of rocks. “Next time you walk in the mountains,” he tells me, “keep a look out and perhaps fate will bring you a remarkable stone.”
Fuchsia Dunlop is the author of “Invitation to a Banquet: the story of Chinese food” (Particular Books)
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