✪ Suiseki or Penjing stones.

A collection of Suiseki or Penjing stones.

Suiseki are traditional Japanese viewing stones they also appear in China as tray-sized landscapes: Penjing which have a long tradition in Chinese scholarly art, dating from the Qin an Han Dynasties.
It's four aesthetic concepts:

• gugao or aloofness
• jianjie or sparseness
• ya or refined elegance
• pingdan or plainness

These stones would enable the scholar to mentally walk through a landscape using the stone on a desk as a lithic virtual reality. A way to travel without moving.