There is a type of stone the Chinese have always treated with particular reverence: a stone that catches the sun and keeps it. *Huanglongyu* — Yellow Dragon Jade — comes from the mountains of Longling in Yunnan, southwestern China, where quartz-rich deposits were coloured by iron into honey, amber and imperial gold. Cut and polished, it glows from within, translucent where thin, smooth as warm wax where thick. This is a pillar cut from that stone. Six centimetres square and eighteen tall, it rises like a column of solidified light — a tall, clean block of even golden yellow, free of clouding, its edges softly rounded so the light travels around every corner. Beneath it sits a dark hardwood base carved with openwork scrollwork, lifting the pillar to a full 22 cm with a weight of 1.75 kg behind it. In form it is a scholar's seal — the traditional block on which a name or motto would be carved — but scaled to the presence of a pillar, a small column that anchors a desk the way a column anchors a hall. It is equally at home in a study among books, on a living room table beside a lamp, or on a shelf where the yellow can be seen across the room. > > *"A column of sunlight, quarried in Yunnan and polished for a hundred years of desks."* A striking piece of contemporary Chinese lapidary work — for collectors of Asian decorative stone, lovers of scholar's objects, or anyone who wants a pillar of imperial yellow holding down their desk.