The China Yingde Ying Stone Culture Festival and Key Project signing, commencement and completion ceremony was held in Yingde, Qingyuan city of Guangdong province Dec 31, 2010 to Jan 3, 2011.

In order to promote the Ying stone culture and economy, Yingde has held a Ying stone culture festival three times. The Ying stone fair held in Yingde’s Wangfu town in Dec 1998 brought in more than 1 million yuan. That Neolithic symposium hotsed by the Yingde government and Sun Yat-sen University attracted more than 100 experts and scholars from home and abroad. After the events, the landscape stone market took off in Yingde. Garden stones from Guangdong province and the neighboring provinces were all shipped to Yingde, making Yingde a distribution center in Southern China.

Yiqing Ying Stone Tourism Company built a Ying stone garden in Wangfu town, the birthplace of Ying stone, with an investment of 100 million yuan. Visitors can use the stone garden for exhibitions, sightseeing, business deals and accommodation.

According to statistics, the annual output value of Ying stone and its related industries in Yingde in 2009 amounted to 5 billion yuan ? making up one third of the city’s GDP. Yingde has 62.5 billion tons of limestone on reserve. In 2005, Yingde was named “the hometown of Ying stone” by the Chinese government. Ying stone rockwork and potted landscape craft was included in the first batch of Guangdong province’s intangible cultural heritages in 2006 and the second batch of national intangible cultural heritages in 2008.

Ying stone, also known as Yingde stone, is a traditional specialty of Yingde and is mainly found on Yingshan Mountain, 25 kilometers east of downtown. Yingshan Mountain was part of the Yingshi township for a period during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The stones are comprised of limestone with calcite deposits and are known for being thin, crinkled, seeped and permeable. The surfaces of the stones are often covered with stretches of wrinkles and shallow craters.

Ying stones are renowned for the representation of different shaped landscapes. The large stones can be used to form scenes, medium-size stones can be used in gardens, and the small stones can form miniature gardens or be used as table top stones.

In the Song Dynasty (960-1279), the stones were often used as tributes. In the Qing Dynasty, Ying stone was as famous as Taihu stone, Libi stone and Huangla stone, and was one of the top four garden stones in China. Zhou Yun Feng, one of the three most famous stones in the regions south of the Yangtze River, is made of Ying stone. The best known sample is called ‘Winkling Cloud Peak’ in Hangzhou’s West Lake.

Editor: Chris