Yunfu
'Stone Capital of China' with 5,200 stone enterprises, 400 years of quarrying expertise, China's largest pyrite reserves, and Guangdong's biggest inland river port. Path dependence made architectural.
Four hundred years of cutting the same stone. Yunfu sits in western Guangdong atop one of China's richest deposits of limestone, marble, granite, and pyrite, and the city has been quarrying and shaping that rock since the Ming Dynasty. Over 5,200 stone enterprises operate here—producing 600 product categories across 13 colour series—earning Yunfu the title 'Stone Capital of China.' The city's industrial output from stone alone exceeded 31.8 billion yuan in 2014. When an entire economy revolves around processing a single geological inheritance, the city becomes a living example of path dependence: the resource dictates the skill, the skill attracts the investment, the investment deepens the specialisation, and any attempt to diversify fights centuries of accumulated expertise.
Yunfu's specialisation extends underground. The city holds China's largest pyrite reserves and operates the country's biggest sulfur chemical production base. The same geological forces that deposited the stone also concentrated the sulfur ore, making Yunfu a two-resource economy—dimensional stone above, industrial minerals below. This dual extraction mirrors the strategy of mycorrhizal fungi that tap both soil minerals and plant sugars simultaneously, drawing from two resource streams through the same network infrastructure.
The geography that enriched Yunfu also constrained it. Located 160 kilometres from Guangzhou in a subtropical valley with abundant rainfall and moderate temperatures, Yunfu remained a mining and agricultural backwater while coastal Guangdong cities industrialised. The Yunfu New Port—Guangdong's largest inland river port—connects the city to the Pearl River Delta's export machine, but the 5,200 stone firms mostly serve domestic construction, not international markets. Yunfu's economy resembles a termite mound: extraordinarily productive within its niche, architecturally sophisticated, but not easily transplanted to a different environment.
Stainless steel tableware manufacturing emerged as an unexpected secondary specialisation—Yunfu is now Guangdong's largest producer—suggesting the city can apply its metalworking and processing skills to adjacent materials. Whether Yunfu evolves beyond stone and sulfur or remains locked into its geological inheritance depends on whether the processing skills transfer faster than the resources deplete. The 400-year experiment continues.