Dragon’s saliva incense: ambergris, and the recipes that left it out

An ambergris accord smells soft and warm, a little sweet and a little salty, closer to skin than to flowers. In our Elegant Orchid & Ambergris it sits under frankincense and agarwood as the warm finish, and like the rest of the bead it lasts for years. Nothing in it comes from a whale.

“Dragon’s saliva” is what longxian 龍涎, the Chinese name for ambergris, literally means. Dragon’s saliva incense, longxian xiang 龍涎香, is incense named after it. In the Song dynasty that name covered two different things: incense made with real ambergris, and a much larger family of incense that borrowed the name and used none.

What Song writers saw

Zhou Qufei, an official who served in the far south, described ambergris in 1178. In the western seas of the Arab lands, he wrote, there are many dragons. One sleeps with its head on a rock, its drool floats on the water and builds up until it hardens, and the jiaoren, sea people of legend, gather it as a treasure. Fresh, it is white. Older, it turns purple, and very old, black.

He had seen some himself in Panyu, the old name for Guangzhou: “neither fragrant nor foul, like pumice but lighter”. Some people say ambergris has a strange fragrance, he went on, and others that its rank smell brings out the other scents. “Both are wrong.” In a blend it neither adds nor takes away, he wrote; it only gathers the smoke. Burn a blend made with real ambergris and “a blue-green smoke floats in the air, holds together and does not scatter”, so that guests can cut the thread of smoke with scissors. That, he explains, is the lingering power of the mirage, the towers that a sea creature breathes out over the water.

Ye Tinggui, another Song official quoted in Chen’s Incense Register, disagreed: he thought ambergris did bring out the other scents. His account is in Elegant Orchid & Ambergris: dragon’s saliva, without the whale. In 1225 Zhao Rugua, the official in charge of foreign trade at the port of Quanzhou, copied Zhou’s entry almost word for word into his book on foreign lands.

Old Ambergris

The most famous ambergris of the age was in the palace. Cai Tao, son of Emperor Huizong’s chief minister, told its story in exile after the fall of the Northern Song. When an old palace storehouse was emptied into the inner treasury, two pieces of ambergris turned up with no record of where they came from. Some said they were tribute from the Arabs in the 950s; others, that they dated from an earlier Song reign.

Most of it was given away to ministers and attendants. The pieces were large and old, and not much to look at. But each time a little was burned over an ember no bigger than a bean, it “gave off a strange flower-like scent that filled the room and hardly faded all day”. Huizong was so struck that he had a list made of everyone who had received some, took it all back into the palace and named it “Old Ambergris”, gu longxian 古龍涎.

The senior eunuchs fought over single cakes of it, worth a hundred strings of cash each. They fitted them with gold or jade, threaded them on blue silk and wore them at the neck, rubbing them at the collar to show one another. “Today’s scent pendants,” Cai wrote, “began with Old Ambergris.”

Ambergris incense without ambergris

Real ambergris was rare and priced like gold. So most dragon’s saliva incense was made without it.

Zhou Qufei says so outright. The reason Guangzhou’s ambergris incense smelled so good, he wrote, was that it used foreign gardenia, fanzhizi 蕃梔子, a dried flower brought from the Arab lands. Zhao Rugua adds that the soft ambergris incense people wore was mostly made with jinyan xiang 金顏香, a tree resin “good at gathering the other scents”.

Chen’s Incense Register, finished by 1322, bears this out. Its second volume alone has twenty-four recipes named for ambergris: “dragon’s saliva incense”, “Old Ambergris”, “white ambergris”, “little ambergris”, even the palace’s own. Only three of them list any ambergris. The rest build the effect from other things:

One “ambergris incense” is ten parts agarwood, three of sandalwood, two each of jinyan resin and borneol, and one of musk, pressed into cakes in moulds. The note says it is best of all as a scent to carry on you.
A “little ambergris incense” is just agarwood and a pinch of borneol, bound with the juice of goose pears, the pear in our Goose-Pear Canopy. There is more on the pear in What is a goose pear?.
A “white ambergris incense” is sandalwood and frankincense with a calcined white mineral, bound with pear juice.
One “Old Ambergris” is agarwood, sandalwood, clove, jinyan resin and suxin 素馨 jasmine, with a little costus root, musk and storax. It can be shaped into flowers, pendants and rings of scent.

In a Song recipe title, then, “ambergris” often named a style of scent rather than an ingredient. That is close to what a perfumer today calls an accord.

What real ambergris is

Ambergris forms in the gut of sperm whales, slowly, over years, and pieces have been found with squid beaks inside them. Only a small share of sperm whales produce it, by one estimate about one in a hundred. When it leaves the whale it smells strongly faecal. After long exposure to sea and air it oxidises, its colour shifts somewhere between black and white, and the smell becomes sweet, earthy and marine.

Its main component, ambrein, has almost no smell of its own. As ambergris ages, ambrein breaks down into other molecules, ambroxide among them, and those carry the scent.

Where it can be sold, beach finds still reach perfumers. In the United States, possessing or trading ambergris is prohibited under the Endangered Species Act, and Australia and India also ban trade in it. In the UK and the EU, it is legal to sell.

What an ambergris accord is

An accord is a blend of aromatic materials built to recall something it does not contain. Modern ambergris accords are usually built around ambroxide made without any whale; it was first made from sclareol, a compound in clary sage. Perfumers describe it as woody, musky and slightly salty. Other materials round it out.

Our ambergris is an accord, listed as one wherever the ingredients appear. So is our agarwood. Every material in every blend is in The materials register.

Why an accord

Three reasons. Nothing comes from a whale. The scent is the same from one batch to the next, where no two pieces of real ambergris smell alike: Huizong’s two lumps could never be repeated. And it can travel: we ship to the United States, where real ambergris cannot be sold.

The Song recipe makers would have recognised the idea. Most of their ambergris incense had no ambergris in it either.

Questions

Is dragon’s saliva incense made from saliva? No. Dragon’s saliva is the old Chinese name for ambergris, from the legend of sea dragons drooling as they slept on rocks.

Does Elegant Orchid & Ambergris contain real ambergris? No. It contains an ambergris accord. Its full list is agarwood accord, sandalwood, frankincense, chuanxiong, rose dew and ambergris accord.

What does it smell like? Warm and resinous: frankincense and agarwood first, the green, rooty edge of chuanxiong, a little rose, and the ambergris accord as a soft, warm finish.

How long does the scent last? For years. Keep the beads dry: take the bracelet off before washing your hands, bathing or swimming.

See the entry: Elegant Orchid & Ambergris · 蘭芳龍涎香

Sources

Zhou Qufei 周去非, Lingwai daida 嶺外代答 (1178), volume 7 (龍涎; 蕃栀子).
Zhao Rugua 趙汝适, Zhufan zhi 諸蕃志 (1225), volume 2 (龍涎; 金顏香).
Cai Tao 蔡絛, Tieweishan congtan 鐵圍山叢談, volume 5 (古龍涎).
Chen Jing, Chenshi xiangpu 陳氏香譜, volume 1 (龍涎香, quoting Ye Tinggui) and volume 2 (the twenty-four recipes: 内府龍涎香, 龍涎香, 古龍涎香, 白龍涎香, 小龍涎香 and others).
Natural History Museum, London, What is ambergris?
Wikipedia, Ambergris (formation, legal status) and Ambroxide.