Sun's journey into carving food began in the 1990s, inspired by his wife. Noticing her love for blood clams, he was struck by the visual contrast between their stark white shells and crimson meat. He realized the raw stones he had on hand were perfectly suited for carving clams.

The inspiration to create an entire banquet came in 1995, when Sun happened upon an online report about an exhibition featuring a feast carved from rare stones from the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. He decided to leverage the rich colors and workable texture of Shoushan stone to recreate the legendary Manchu-Han Imperial Feast.

Sun spent decades meticulously carving dishes. In 2013, he achieved a Guinness World Record for the "collection of stone-carved dishes with the highest number of unique items", with 143 distinct plates. Today, that number has climbed to over 160.

The path was not without obstacles. Traditional Shoushan carving typically features landscapes, figures, flowers and birds, favoring elegant, scholarly aesthetics. When Sun began carving roasted suckling pigs, chestnuts and fish balls, his family and peers were baffled, believing such subjects lacked the commercial value of traditional motifs.

But Sun held firm. "I wanted to create something that belongs to our era," he said. "We cannot remain stuck in the past; we must uphold tradition while pursuing innovation."

His philosophy required stoic patience. To perfect his "roasted suckling pig" carving, Sun purchased six real roasted pigs to carefully study the changes in color and texture of the crispy skin. He became a regular at wet markets, filling notebooks with observations on the shapes and textures of ingredients before returning home to refine his technique.

According to Sun, the biggest challenge is stone selection. The raw material must match the shape and color of the food, but more importantly, he uses ingenuity to give the "dish" life. Several times, upon finding a more suitable stone, he unhesitatingly scrapped a finished piece to carve it again from scratch.