Where it comes from, and how it reaches you.
21 answers are written under this subject. 21 answered so far.
It is quarried in Guizhou Province in southwest China, in a belt of wood-grain marbles that runs through the province. The stone is cut in the same region and then processed in Shuitou or Yunfu before it is exported.
The Qingyi River Hotel photographs on this site show our stone as wall cladding and column facing through the public rooms. The floor in those photographs is a dark grey marble and the reception counter is a pale cream marble — different materials, and the captions say so.
Importers and stone distributors who buy slabs by the container, and fabricators who buy cut-to-size for a project. The end use is mostly hospitality and retail: hotel lobbies, receptions, corridors and lift lobbies, plus the wood-look flooring that goes with them.
It ships most of it from Shuitou and Xiamen. The buyers are concentrated in the Middle East, in South-East Asia, in Africa and in the Americas, and the hotel and retail projects that use it are the ones that want a wood look without timber's maintenance.
Allow the normal stone lead time and order the material after the fixing design is settled, not before. The figure has to be chosen across the whole surface, so the layout has to exist before the slab is cut, and cutting cannot be undone.
It depends on what is being made and where it is going. Stock slabs move fastest. Cut-to-size adds the cutting and polishing, and a project adds the approval time on the drawings, which is usually the longest part of it and is not ours to shorten.
From a quarry in Guizhou Province in southwest China. It is cut in the same region and processed in Shuitou or Yunfu in Guangdong, and it leaves through Shuitou or Xiamen. The quarry and the processing are two separate places.
From us, by the container or by the project. We supply slabs and cut-to-size to importers, fabricators and contractors. We do not sell retail quantities and we do not sell through a network of websites.
About a thousand kilometres away, in a different province. The quarry is in Guizhou and the cutting and polishing happens in Shuitou or Yunfu in Guangdong, where the saws and the polishing lines are and where the container is loaded.
The coffee bed is the fourth one down from the top of the worked face. Above it are white wood grain, elegant black and grey wood grain; below it are two more elegant black beds and a black and white one. The overburden is taken off first.
Ask for one, and say which form you are choosing so that the sample is the right thing to look at. A sample of a polished board tells you the figure and the colour; it does not tell you how a slab reads at 2.4 metres.
Slabs are banded on A-frames and crated in fumigated timber, with foam between the faces; tiles and cut-to-size are boxed and banded. Containers are loaded from the works and the stone travels in a dry box, not in the open.
By container from Shuitou or Xiamen, on the usual terms, and the buyer's own freight forwarder normally handles the destination leg. We ship the stone and the paperwork; what happens after it lands is between the buyer and their forwarder.
Check the block number against the packing list, check the face for the figure you ordered, and check the thickness at the edge. If the slab is not the one, photograph it before it is cut, because after it is cut the question is gone.
Order from one block, and grade it before cutting. Colour in this stone varies across a bed and across a block, and the only way to hold a consistent tone across a surface is to choose the slabs for it, in the same block, before anything is cut.
Choose for the figure first and the colour second, and look at the slab standing up rather than laid flat. The figure is what the room will be read as, and a slab seen flat on a yard frame is not how it will be seen.
We do not publish a yield figure, because yield is a property of a particular block rather than of the bed, and a published average would be a number that means nothing on the block you are buying. What we can do is tell you the yield of the block in front of you.
A cut board from the block, yes, and it can be sent before the order. A photograph of the slab you are being offered, yes, and that is the more useful of the two for a large surface.
A block is the piece that comes out of the quarry, roughly rectangular and unsawn on its faces. A slab is what the block becomes at the saw: one face polished, the block cut into boards of a given thickness, each with the figure running the length of it.
In three pieces: a cut board in the hand, a photograph of the actual slab, and a photograph of the material in a built room. A board shows the colour, a slab shows the figure and a room shows the scale, and a client who only has one of them is deciding on incomplete information.
Marble is a quarried natural stone with a long service life, and the honest comparison is with the material it replaces rather than with other stones. It is non-combustible and it does not need replacing, but quarrying is quarrying, and we do not claim more than that.
Ordered by how many questions each one holds.