Chinese Stone Trough Planter

Shandong Province lies along China’s east coast. The name Shandong means “east of the mountains,” a reference to the province’s Taihang Mountains, the place where Taoism and Confucianism were born. Yet, it is the flat terrain of the rest of the province where this week’s new arrival was brought into being over 400 years ago, on China’s vast Northern Plain at the intersection of ancient trading routes.

Back then, there were no trucks, planes or high speed trains. Those means of conveyance were not even a dream. What did move the bolts of silk, the barrels of spices, the lock boxes of luxury goods and the people who cared for them were carts and wagons powered by caravans of countless horses moving in a constant, slow, clippity-clop flow along well-traveled, rock hard, pounded roads.

Re-purposed Stone Horse Trough (detail)

Dotting the roads at regular intervals were numerous inns and rest stops; places to eat, sleep and fill people and horses with whatever was needed. For horses, the menu was simple – hay and oats – with water to follow served in simple, rectangular, utilitarian troughs cut from granite quarried in the nearby mountains; until the advent of modern transportation made horses and the troughs a thing of the past.

Featured is a trough we dressed it up and gave it new life – repurposed it – by fabricating a solid wood base to showcase its rustic good looks and simple, elegant, hand chiseled form. Now it can be used indoors or out, perhaps as a planter, a pond for koi fish, even a miniature Zen garden. It stands as a reminder that obsolescence can become obsolete when the past is brought into the present.

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