China has a long and rich incense culture, and is a major incense producer in the world today.
As I have written in other posts, the earliest documented use of incense was in ancient China, and the first known Chinese aromatics book written was approximately 2,500 years ago in the Han Dynasty. Since then, a vast repository of literature has been written about the subject, and countless recipes have been developed and refined.
“Incense”, or more precisely the Chinese word xiang (香) also had far broader use than the what we associate with the word incense today. All of the ingredients below had medicinal applications, both in incense form and also taken orally; and many were used as cooking spices, not to mention as perfume for their scent.
There are over 400 types of incense ingredients used in Chinese incense, and over 100 incense blends which are fairly commonly used. While some of these are also found in other cultures, many were fairly unique to China as they depended on local plants. We will try to provide a brief introduction to the most important Chinese incense ingredients here.
To make flammable incense, ingredients are powdered and blended, then mixed with water and formed into shape – this is the traditional art of hand making natural incense. And if you are interested in how to create an incense blend using some of the ingredients below, please check out this article here.
