At a time when many people are saving every penny they can to buy a new car or a bigger house, one man in Jilin province has been looking everywhere and blowing every penny he ever saved on a collection of carved stones, and not just any stones, but especially those from the Liao (916-1125) and Jin (1115-1234) dynasties.

But how he got this way from back when he had a wealthier urban lifestyle and an "iron rice bowl" job, something that practically everybody in northeastern China would have admired, in 1997, is an interesting story.

Jia Bingshan blows the snow off the surface of a hitching post. [Photo by Wang Zhendong/365jilin.com]

The 54-year-old Jia Bingshan says he's always been a sort of loner and after finishing a stint in the military at the age of 21, he went to work in Nong'an which had been a political, economic and military center for both the Liao and Jin dynasties, but became a small county near the city of Changchun. Jia had an old habit of frequenting flea markets and farm houses and, one day, got a stone said to be from the New Stone Age, his first purchase of that king and the start of his large collection and interest in carved stones.

Badly worn stone tablet against the wall. [Photo by Wang Zhendong/365jilin.com]

He figures that he probably has enough stones to join Jilin's newly-minted millionaires if he decided to sell the collection, but has kept them all in one big courtyard in a small village in the county, in the hope that these relics can help explain Liao and Jin history. Still, the question lingers: what possible reason could he have for this set of values?