MERIDIAN HARMONY

Journal

Did people in ancient China wear scent? From pouches to beads

Yes. For more than two thousand years, people in China carried scent on the body, though rarely as liquid perfume. They threaded fragrant plants into pendants, hung small scent pouches from a cord or tied them to the arm, sewed powdered blends into gauze bags, and, by the Song dynasty, rolled blended incense into beads.

Orchids worn at the belt

One of the oldest pictures is in Encountering Sorrow (Li sao 離騷), the long poem attributed to Qu Yuan of the state of Chu, around 300 BCE. “I wrapped myself in river lovage and hidden angelica,” the poet says, “and threaded autumn lan to wear at my belt.” Later he complains of his age: every household stuffs its belt with mugwort, and says the hidden lan is not fit to wear.

The lan of the poem was probably not an orchid. Zhu Xi, the twelfth-century philosopher, pointed this out in his notes on the poem. The fragrant plants of the ancients, he wrote, “must have had scented flowers and leaves, and kept their scent wet or dry, so they could be cut and worn”. The orchids of his own day had fragrant flowers, but their leaves had no smell, and they wilted easily: “none of them could be cut and worn”. Chen’s Incense Register copies his note into its first volume.

A pouch for greeting your parents

The Book of Rites, compiled in the Han dynasty from older writings, describes how children served their parents. Before they came of age, boys and girls rose at the first cockcrow, washed, combed and tied up their hair, tied on their cords, “and all wore rongchou 容臭”. At dawn they went in to ask their parents what they had eaten and drunk.

Zheng Xuan, who annotated the text in the second century, explains that rongchou are “scented things”, worn on a cord, because the children came close to their elders to run small errands. The word chou 臭 now means a bad smell. A seventh-century commentary says that here it means fragrance. A Ming-dynasty reader, Chen Xuan, put the reason plainly: so that no unpleasant smell on them would reach their elders.

The same chapter mentions scented plants as presents. If a young wife was given food, clothes, cloth, a sash, or angelica and lan, she accepted it and offered it to her parents-in-law.

Tied to the arm

By the end of the Han, the scent pouch, xiangnang 香囊, was a love token. In a poem by Fan Qin, who died in 218, a woman lists the tokens of their love. “How to show devotion? Two gold rings to bind the arm.” Then: “How to show I’m in earnest? A scent pouch tied behind the elbow. How to say we’ll stay together? Two bangles coiled round the wrist.”

In Southeast Fly the Peacocks, a long ballad of the same period, a young wife sent back to her family lists what she must leave behind: an embroidered jacket, “a double canopy of red gauze, scent pouches hanging from its four corners”, and sixty or seventy boxes tied with green cords.

Not everyone approved. The History of the Jin says that as a young man Xie Xuan liked to wear a purple gauze scent pouch. His uncle, the statesman Xie An, disliked it, but did not want to hurt his feelings. So he won the pouch from him in a game and burned it, and Xuan stopped wearing one.

Recipes for wearing

Chen’s Incense Register gives a whole section to “scents for wearing and for clothes”. One recipe is named after Xun Yu, the Han minister whose seat stayed fragrant for three days after he left it. Minister Xun’s ten-li scent blends cloves, sandalwood, spikenard and lingling herb with a little borneol and fennel. It is powdered and carried in a gauze pouch lined with thin paper. The fennel needs judgement: raw, it has no scent; roasted too long, it smells burnt; too much and the blend smells of medicine, too little and it no longer recalls flowers. Add it a little at a time, the register says, until the scent is right.

A peony scent for clothes has no peony flowers in it, only cloves, peony root bark and spikenard with a pinch of borneol and musk. Wrapped in flower-patterned paper, or in a new silk bag worn against the skin, it “smells like peony”. A lotus scent is wrapped in a new handkerchief and carried against the skin when you go out, and smells “like a lotus just opened”. Another recipe ends: “it can be burned, or worn.”

The same volume has about ten recipes for scenting clothes over a censer, one of them for the robes of the ruler of Shu. A Song scholar named Mei did the same with his sleeves every morning: see Hexiang: blended incense, worn as beads.

Liquid perfume came late, and from abroad. In 958, the register records, a tribute mission presented fifteen bottles of rose water from the far west. Clothes sprinkled with it wore out before the scent did. Few bottles followed. By the Song, the register says, people steamed jasmine flowers to make a substitute.

Beads of blended incense

The fourth volume of Chen’s register opens with scented beads, xiangzhu 香珠. “The method for scented beads is found among the Daoists, and goes back a long way,” it begins. “So I record it here, so as not to be faulted for not knowing a thing.”

The first recipe is Commissioner Sun’s osmanthus beads: flowers gathered in bud, ground on a stone mill, rolled into beads the size of a small coin and strung a hundred to a cord. Hexiang: blended incense, worn as beads follows the recipe step by step, with the register’s advice on keeping them.

A string on the wrist

In the eighteenth century, a string of scented beads could be worn on the wrist. In chapter 28 of Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin’s novel, the Imperial Consort sends the family presents for the Duanwu festival: palace fans, phoenix-tail gauze, a cool summer mat, and two strings of red musk beads. Baoyu finds that his gifts match his cousin Baochai’s and nobody else’s. Later he asks to see her red musk string. She happens to be wearing it on her left wrist, and it takes her a moment to work it off. The chapter’s title has her wearing it shyly.

Ours

Our bracelets are hexiang, blended incense, shaped into beads and worn on the wrist. Each formula is powdered, blended and shaped into beads by hand, then dried for at least twenty days. We list the materials in order of quantity and say which ones are accords: our agarwood and ambergris are accords, and nothing in our blends comes from a whale. Our beads aren’t made to the recipes above. We quote them because they show how long people in China have chosen a scent to carry with them.

How scented beads differ from oil diffuser bracelets and perfume cords: Four ways a bracelet can carry scent. Choosing one as a present: A gift for someone who loves scent.

Sources