The art of incense blending has thousands of years of history in China. The first known Chinese incense recipes book, called Blended Incense Recipes 《和香方》, was written approximately 2,500 years ago. Over the subsequent centuries, countless recipes were developed and recorded. We have written fairly comprehensively about the art of hand making natural incense sticks previously, so this article will focus on the ingredients and formula of the incense.
As Chinese incense use evolved and became ever more sophisticated, it was introduced to Japan along with Buddhism in the 6th century (Tang dynasty). Through the Song dynasty (10th-13th centuries) and beyond, incense was widely used in both countries, and recipes continued to flow across the ocean from China to Japan. The foundations of Japanese incense (and of other East Asian countries such as Korea and Vietnam) therefore lies in Chinese incense. And when we refer to traditional formulas below, we refer to the collective foundations of all these East Asian incense.
