Stonetable (石桌图鉴) is a field notebook for rocks and minerals — written to be used standing up, in the rain, with cold hands, on the outcrop where the identification has to happen.
Stonetable is a reference for anyone who picks up a rock and wants to know what it is. Every entry is a specimen sheet: what the thing looks like, how hard it is, how it breaks, where it occurs, what it is commonly confused with, and what tests actually settle the question at the outcrop. We cover thirty subjects in four groups — igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rocks, plus the minerals that form them — and each one is written in both English and Chinese.
Most rock and mineral guides are organised by name, which is only useful once you already know the answer. Stonetable is organised around what you can actually do with two hands, a knife, a hand lens, a streak plate and a bottle of dilute acid. Every entry leads with tests that take under two minutes and that produce a result you can see. Hardness, cleavage, streak, acid reaction, magnetism and density between them identify almost every common specimen, and they are all available without a laboratory.
We do not tell you what your specimen is worth. We do not give collection localities for protected sites, and we do not describe how to extract material from them. We do not cover lapidary or jewellery valuation. And we do not pretend that identification from a photograph is reliable — a photograph cannot tell you the hardness, the streak or the feel, which is where most of the information lives.
Each sheet is checked against standard mineralogical references for the physical properties: hardness on Mohs' scale, cleavage angle and direction, streak colour, lustre, crystal system and habit, and the specific gravity where it is diagnostic. The narrative sections are written from the perspective of field practice, and the hazards sections are included deliberately — several minerals in this collection are genuinely dangerous to breathe, to taste or to store, and a guide that omits that is incomplete.
The illustration on each sheet is not a photograph. It is a generated wireframe plate: crystal forms are drawn as projected polyhedra, with line weight scaled to the mineral's hardness, cleavage directions marked as dashed traces, and twin seams shown where twinning is characteristic. Rocks, which have no crystal form of their own, are drawn as fabric plates showing grain mosaic, bedding laminae, vesicles or conchoidal fracture according to their texture. This is deliberate: a schematic that shows you which properties to look for is more useful in the field than a beautiful photograph that hides them.
The collection is released gradually rather than all at once, so that each sheet is written and checked rather than rushed. Sheets that have not yet reached their publication date do not appear in the listings, in the search index or in the sitemap; they go live on their scheduled day. If you are looking for a subject that is not yet on the site, it is probably scheduled — the About page and the category listings always reflect exactly what is live.