Gongshi or Spirit Stone

A stone shaped like a gourd and cracked like a tortoise. Nobody asked it to be either.

This gongshi, or spirit stone, is a piece of tortoise shell stone, gui wen shi, set on a hardwood base. Spirit stones were collected for their strange forms and kept on desks and shelves as objects for quiet contemplation, each one read like a small landscape or a living thing. Dark, scale-like plates divide across the surface, bounded by pale ridges. The form swells in two round lobes, with a small knob at the side and a narrower peak above. A six-sided base carries it. Seventeen and three quarters inches high.

It has no function whatsoever. That is the appeal.