About Jianyuan

About me

I'm Jianyuan. I've collected Mount Tai stones for years, and I'm still a student of the culture around them.

The first one I ever met was a Shigandang. A plain stone with three characters carved on it, standing at the mouth of an alley in my hometown. I didn't understand it then. Years later I learned what sat behind it: a folk custom that runs two thousand years deep, the emperors who climbed Mount Tai for the fengshan rites, scholars who kept stones on their desks, and ordinary families who asked for nothing more than steadiness.

I keep a small stone house in Tai'an, at the foot of the mountain. Over the years I've gathered a few dozen stones. Each one gets a file when it joins the collection: number, size, weight, texture, and where it came from. (Years and exact location, and the exact count, to be confirmed.)

Stones are history you can hold. The rock of Mount Tai is around 2.7 billion years old. The Shigandang custom was named to China's first national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Mining and sale have been restricted for years, so the stones that remain are only what was gathered before. All of that is written on the surface of these rocks.

About Mount Tai stone

Mount Tai stone (also written Tai Shan stone) is natural rock from the Mount Tai range. Mount Tai is the first of China's Five Great Mountains, the mountain where emperors performed the fengshan rites, and the source of the phrase "steady as Mount Tai."

Taishan Shigandang is a folk-custom object: a tablet inscribed with the characters Shi Gan Dang, placed at a house gate, an alley mouth or a bridgehead. In folk tradition it was regarded as a guardian of the household. We would rather call it what it is: a natural cultural stone from Mount Tai.

What we show here is old stock, gathered years ago, natural and uncarved. (Sourcing note to be confirmed.)