bonsai skill (the skill of rockery bonsai), a traditional art in yingde city, Guangdong Province, is one of the national intangible cultural heritages. Yingshi rockery bonsai mainly includes landscape type, dry mountain type, tree-attached stone type and stone-attached tree type, and its shapes mainly include peaks, mountains, ridges, gorges, cliffs, valleys, islands, rocky hills, caves, cen, Zhu and so on. Traditional stone rockery bonsai skills are good at identifying stone materials, and there are not many materials, some of which are made of three or five pieces. The bonsai is made by selecting rockery components, washing and trimming, mixing with cement, fine sand, yellow sugar and black ink, and pasting components according to the design process.
Bonsai originated from ornamental plants. As early as the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, it was customary to watch famous trees and flowers. In the Han Dynasty, bonsai with "building stones into mountains" appeared, which can be found in the murals of Han tombs. Since Wei and Jin Dynasties, bonsai production has made great progress. To the Tang Dynasty, bonsai became the furnishings of wealthy families, and many murals and silk paintings at that time reflected this situation. Yingshi rockery bonsai is mainly composed of Yingshi. The limestone produced in Yingshan, Yingde Wangbu Town, which belongs to karst landform, has been weathered and corroded to form numerous loose plates with rich and colorful texture and color. It is called Yingshi because of its rugged shape, precipitous beauty and exquisite air. In Song Dynasty, Yingshi was listed as a tribute. Yingshi has also become a natural material to create rockery bonsai because of its strange shapes. According to Yuan Ye written by Ji Cheng in Ming Dynasty, at that time, yingshi was already used to "point the pots to make a scene". After the reform and opening up, the local yingshi rockery bonsai technology has developed into a cultural industry with fine division of labor and considerable scale.