Incense in China: From Han Censers to Song Dynasty Blends

Incense arrived in China as a courtly and religious practice long before it became a literary art. From the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) onward, aristocrats burned aromatic woods and resins in bronze boshanlu, hill-shaped censers cast to resemble the mythical mountain-island Penglai, letting smoke curl through pierced apertures to suggest immortal peaks wreathed in cloud. Buddhism’s spread from the first century CE, and the growth of maritime trade through Guangzhou, brought Southeast Asian and West Asian resins — frankincense, myrrh, storax and benzoin — into wider use by the Tang dynasty (618–907). By the Song dynasty (960–1279), court perfumers, physicians and literati were no longer burning single materials but compounding them into pressed, honey-bound blends, recorded in dedicated manuals such as the Xiangpu attributed to the scholar Hong Chu. That arc, from single hill censers to compounded recipes, defines the history of incense in China.

Han dynasty hill censers: the origins of Chinese incense burning

The boshanlu is the emblem of early Chinese incense culture. Cast in bronze, sometimes inlaid with gold or silver, its lid rises in tiers meant to evoke a mountain landscape, with small holes cut so that smoke escapes slowly and diffusely rather than in a single column. The form is linked to Han-dynasty ideas about immortal islands in the eastern sea, places believed to be reachable by ascetics and emperors seeking longevity.

Early censers burned aromatics available within China itself: cassia bark, cypress, and various dried herbs and roots. As Han maritime contact expanded south of Guangzhou (then Panyu), the geographical treatise of the Han Shu records ships sailing toward Southeast Asia and South Asia in search of pearls, glass and aromatic goods. This is the first documented channel through which resins from outside China’s borders began reaching Han households and temples, though it would take several more centuries for frankincense, myrrh and benzoin to become common trade items.

How did foreign resins reach China?

Two separate routes carried resin into China, and the distinction shows up in the names themselves. The overland Silk Road, running through Central Asia and Persia, brought West Asian materials sold under names that recorded their origin: anxixiang for a resin from Anxi (Parthia), suhexiang for a resin associated with regions further west still, sometimes linked to Fulin, the Chinese name for Byzantine territory.

The maritime route, landing at Guangzhou and later Quanzhou, carried a different set of goods. Arab and Persian merchants brought frankincense and myrrh, tapped from Boswellia and Commiphora trees in Arabia and the Horn of Africa, while Southeast Asian shippers brought agarwood from Hainan and Champa, and benzoin from the Styrax forests of Sumatra and Siam. By the Tang dynasty both routes were active simultaneously, so a single incense recipe could combine a Persian gum with an Arabian resin and a Southeast Asian wood in one burning.

What did Han and Tang incense smell like?

Reconstructing the exact scent of Han or Tang incense is not possible from written sources alone, but the individual materials are well characterized. Storax and benzoin both carry a warm, balsamic sweetness built on benzoic and cinnamic acid derivatives, with vanillin contributing a soft vanilla note as the resin ages — the same chemistry that gives modern benzoin its recognizable profile. Frankincense burns brighter and more resinous, with a citrus-pine lift from its monoterpene fraction. Agarwood, when genuine and aged, adds a complex, animalic-sweet base note that Chinese and later Japanese connoisseurs prized above almost any other material.

Tang-dynasty compounding began layering these profiles deliberately: a balsamic resin as a fixative and sweetener, a bright resin for lift, camphor or clove for sharpness, and agarwood or musk for depth. This layering logic, rather than any single recipe, is what carried forward into the Song.

Anxixiang and suhexiang: benzoin, storax and a tangle of names

Few materials illustrate the instability of historical Chinese aromatic names as clearly as anxixiang. Tang pharmacological texts describe it as a resin imported from Persia, valued medicinally and burned to purify a room. Over the following centuries, as the balance of trade shifted toward Southeast Asia, the same name came to be applied to benzoin harvested from Styrax benzoin and Styrax tonkinensis trees in Sumatra and Siam — a genuinely different plant family from whatever balsam the earlier Persian trade had supplied. The transition is documented in more detail in Anxixiang: Benzoin in Chinese Materia Medica.

Suhexiang followed a separate path and is generally identified by scholars with true storax, the balsam of Liquidambar orientalis, a tree native to southwestern Turkey and once more widely distributed across the eastern Mediterranean and Levant. Its Chinese name situates its origin further west than anxixiang, consistent with a resin passing through Persian middlemen from lands closer to the Mediterranean. Both materials appear side by side in Chinese materia medica, and their medicinal uses are surveyed in Benzoin in Traditional Medicine.

The Song dynasty and the rise of compound incense

Song China did not invent resin incense, but it turned incense-making into a codified craft. Hexiang, compound incense, describes the practice of grinding several resins and aromatics together, binding them with honey or another agent, and pressing the paste into pellets, cakes or coils that burned slowly and evenly. A single hexiang recipe might combine benzoin or storax as a sweetener and fixative, frankincense or myrrh for resinous lift, agarwood for depth, and camphor, clove or musk for top notes.

This compounding culture served several audiences at once: the imperial court, where specific blends marked rank and occasion; Buddhist and Daoist temples, where incense accompanied ritual; and the literati, who burned incense during poetry gatherings, tea ceremonies and quiet study, much as they cultivated flowers or practiced calligraphy. The customs officer Zhao Rugua, writing at Quanzhou in the early thirteenth century, recorded the foreign resins and aromatics passing through that port in detail, giving historians one of the clearer pictures of what Song incense-makers actually had on hand.

Incense manuals and the literati culture of scent

The Song period also produced a distinct genre of writing: the incense manual, or xiangpu. These texts catalogued materials by origin and quality, described methods of preparation, and recorded specific recipes, treating incense compounding with the same seriousness applied to tea or wine. The manual attributed to Hong Chu is among the earliest and best known of this genre; later scholars, including Ye Tinggui, compiled their own versions, expanding the catalogue of materials and recipes as trade brought in new options.

This literary tradition helped incense compounding travel beyond China. Chinese Buddhist practices of resin burning and blending were transmitted to Japan over several centuries and eventually formalized into a distinct discipline of incense appreciation, described in more detail in Kōdō: the Japanese Way of Listening to Incense. The Song aesthetic of compounded, contemplative incense is a direct ancestor of that later practice.

Aromatics used in Chinese incense, Han to Song

What happened to this tradition after the Song?

Compound incense-making continued into the Yuan and Ming dynasties, with later manuals expanding on Song-era recipes and materials, and the underlying trade routes through Guangzhou and Quanzhou persisting even as the political powers controlling them changed. Temple incense in China today still relies on the same core materials — frankincense, myrrh, benzoin, agarwood, camphor — combined in ratios that trace their logic back to Song compounding practice.

The clearest living inheritance of this period, however, lies outside China: Japan’s kōdō tradition preserves the Song ideal of incense as a contemplative art, built on the same compounding techniques and many of the same imported resins that Song literati first catalogued in their xiangpu manuals.

• incense
• china
• history
• benzoin
• frankincense