Where obsession's rock-solid legacy is etched in stone

The new magistrate was too busy extemporaneously, yet extravagantly, revering a rock to meet the waiting administrators.

The eccentric scholar was paying his first formal visit to Wuwei county as its just-appointed judge to meet the officials he'd work with, when he encountered this splendid stone outside their gate in the early 1100s.

The bureaucrats waited, watching disbelievingly, as Mi Fu addressed the stone as "elder brother", and delivered a protracted, stirring speech to the handsome boulder.

He then performed the Confucian rites designated for (human) older male siblings.

This account earned him the nickname Crazy Mi and has remained a motif of painters and poets.

But while his behavior may seem extreme, China has been crazy about rocks for centuries. They're often literally put on pedestals.

Gongshi (scholars' stones) are still found on wooden stands atop the desks of literati, executives and officials. Entire gardens, including some of the country's most celebrated, have been built around rockeries.

Some credit this legacy to Tang Dynasty (618-907) poet Bai Juyi, who served as prefect of Suzhou, a city in Jiangsu province known as "China's Eden" for its abundance of magnificent gardens, including their spectacular rockeries.

It's said he encountered two infatuating stones that he took home while walking near Taihu Lake.

He paid homage to them with the poem, A Pair of Rocks. "Turning my head around, I ask the pair of rocks: 'Can you keep company with an old man like myself?' Although the rocks cannot speak, they promise that we will be three friends."

Still, Bai Juyi warned against too much of a good thing in his later treatise, Account of the Taihu Lake Rocks. He suggests people limit the time spent adoring them to "a few hours a day".

Some even credit unrestrained petrophilia as a contributing factor to the Northern Song Dynasty's (960-1127) fall. Emperor Huizong is said to have exploited his subjects to procure scholars' stones for his imperial garden.

He personally named them, labeled them with gold calligraphy and wrote odes to them. It's also believed he even removed vital bridges to enable boats carrying beautiful boulders to pass along the waterways.

All the while, his country was facing invasion by nomadic Manchurians.

In the end, his trove of rocks was used as catapult fodder and lost forever alongside his empire.

Ultimately, his obsession led not only to the demise of his dynasty but also to the annihilation of the stones themselves.

Crazy Mi identified four characteristics by which gongshi should be evaluated. Shou is the vertical directionality. Lou describes the prevalence of rifts. Zhou refers to the finely crinkled texture. And tou are holes through which light can shine.

Other qualities for evaluating gongshi include asymmetry, glossiness, a resemblance to landscape formations like mountains, and how they sound when struck.

Most scholars' rocks are limestone, which dissolve to form tou, making them appear like melting honeycombs. This includes the three major categories that take their namesakes from their places of origin－Taihu Lake (Jiangsu), Lingbi (Anhui province) and Yingde (Guangdong province).

Academics attribute the Chinese celebration of such stones to philosophical traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism that imbue natural objects like rocks, water and trees with virtues such as wisdom and integrity.

I'd honestly never paid much attention to stones that weren't at least semiprecious or fossils before coming to China.

But now I take a few seconds－not hours－to appreciate gongshi when I see them in gardens or on desks.

I even bought some for my home office, as my only Christmas present to myself.

China showed me that staring at stones can be more thought provoking than I'd, well, thought before I did it.