Meat-shaped Stone
Qing dynasty, eighteenth to nineteenth century
Beside the cabbage sits its companion piece, a lump of stone that looks exactly like a piece of pork belly stewed in soy sauce. It is under six centimetres high. Layers of fat and lean meat alternate in bands, the skin on top is dark, glossy and dimpled with pores, and the whole thing rests on a little gilt stand like a dish on a banquet table. Visitors laugh when they see it, and then they look closer and stop laughing, because the resemblance is uncanny.
The stone is a banded jasper, a form of agate that forms naturally in layers of slightly different colour. The Qing court craftsman chose a piece whose layers already suggested meat, cut and polished it to the shape of a cube of belly pork, and then dyed the top layer a rich brown to imitate skin that has been braised. The pores in the skin were carefully drilled by hand. Look at the sides, where the layers of pale fat and dark meat run in wavy lines, and at the top, where the surface is not perfectly smooth but slightly uneven, as real skin would be after cooking.
Why would an emperor want a stone that looks like dinner? Chinese scholars had for centuries collected rocks that resembled mountains, animals or clouds, valuing the wit of nature and the eye that could see it. The Meat shaped Stone belongs to that tradition of the curio, an object to be picked up, turned over and enjoyed in the study. Together with the Jadeite Cabbage and the Mao Gong ding it forms what people call the museum's three treasures, and it now divides its time between Taipei and the Southern Branch in Chiayi, where it is just as popular.
Did You Know? The dish it imitates, dongpo pork, is named after the poet Su Shi, whose calligraphy is also in this museum.
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