How the Song burned incense: charcoal, ash and mica
Goose-Pear Canopy opens on crisp pear and settles into honeyed agarwood and creamy sandalwood. Its materials are an agarwood accord, sandalwood, goose pear and Pu’er tea leaves. As beads, it gives off that scent close to the skin without any heat, and it lasts for years. Its name comes from a blend that was burned inside the curtains of a bed, and burning, as the Song registers describe it, was gentler than a flame. Chen’s Incense Register, with a preface dated 1322, gives the method: bury a lit charcoal cake in fine ash, lay a dish of silver or mica over it, and set the incense on top, so that “the incense does not reach the fire”.
The register spends pages on each part of that method. There are recipes for the charcoal, for the coal that lit it and for the ash, and notes on every tool. This is what they say.
Warmed, not set alight
The rule comes in the first volume, quoted from an older History of Incense 香史:
Burn incense in a deep room or a winding chamber. Set the censer on a low table, level with a person’s knees. Over the fire place a leaf of silver or of mica, shaped like a dish, and lay the incense on it. The incense does not reach the fire, so it opens slowly of itself, with no smoke and no scorched smell.
The ember sits under the ash, the heat comes up through the ash to the leaf, and the incense on the leaf is warmed rather than burned. What reaches the room is the scent of the blend, not its smoke.
The separator was older than the Song. The Tang poet Li Shangyin (about 813–858), in a “Song of burning incense” that Chen also keeps, sees “the beast’s flame, faintly red, behind mica”. In the Southern Song, Yang Wanli wrote:
Carve porcelain into a censer greener than water, shave silver into a leaf as light as paper. A fire neither gentle nor fierce, its heat even; shut the door, let the curtain down, and no wind stirs.
What he wanted, he says, was “scent, and no smoke to be seen”. The rest of the poem is in Jasmine Snowfall.
The charcoal: cakes that burn all day
The fire under the ash was not a lump from the kitchen stove. The third volume of the register has a run of recipes for incense cakes, xiangbing 香餅: charcoal powder bound with plant juice or paste and pressed into small cakes that burn slowly and evenly.
It opens with how to use them: “To burn incense with a cake, first burn it until it is red right through and put it in the censer. Wait until a yellow coat forms, then cover it slowly with ash, and test the heat with your hand to see whether it is strong or gentle.”
The plainest recipe takes three jin of soft charcoal, ground to powder, and a jin and a half of hollyhock flowers or leaves. Pound them together until they stick, and if the mix is dry, add a little thin flour paste. Roll it into balls the size of a crossbow pellet, press them into cakes, dry them in the sun and keep them in a porcelain jar, taking them out as needed. With no hollyhock to hand, the dregs of safflower will do. Another note prefers oak charcoal with cypress leaves, mallow and acorns: oak charcoal alone is overburnt and crumbles, and “stone cakes are too fierce; don’t use them”.
The named cakes were made to last. One is called the All-Day cake: when the incense is finished, dip the cake in water to put it out, and it can be used again. Each palace cake lasts a whole day. The “seven treasures of the study” cake of Ding Wei, a chief minister of the early eleventh century, mixes charcoal with Qingzhou jujubes, stones and all, iron filings “from where needles are made”, fine ink and twenty cloves, among other things, and is moulded to the size of a coin. Each one, the recipe says, burns through a day and a night.
Even charcoal ground into a blend, as some recipes asked, was prepared with care. Fire it a second time, the first volume says, and let it cool in a sealed vessel, “first to drive out any raw wood left in it, and second to drive out the foul air in the charcoal”.
Lighting it cleanly
A cake still had to be lit. The register’s note on incense coal, xiangmei 香煤, explains why that mattered: “Lately, when people burn incense, they take the fire from under the kitchen stove or from a foot warmer, and use it in offerings to the gods and the Buddha and to their ancestors. That is far from clean.” So a separate coal was made to catch the fire and pass it on to the cake.
Yan Ziqin’s recipe uses cypress leaves. Gather plenty, strip off the stalks, wash them, dry them in the sun and chop them, “but not from among the graves”. Seal them in a clean jar with salt clay and fire them in charcoal until they are charred but not yet ash, then grind them fine. Put one or two qian on the ash in the censer, light it with a paper spill and spread it evenly. Add a little from time to time while you burn incense, “and it will last all day”. Cypress seeds charred the same way, a note adds, are better still.
The ash: “like snow”
Ash was the bed of the whole arrangement. It covered the ember, spread its heat and held the leaf level. The register’s entry on incense ash, xianghui 香灰, gives about a dozen ways to make it.
Burn the twigs of fine-leaved fir to ash, keep one or two embers in it overnight, sieve it and fill the censer. Each autumn, gather pine needles, dry them and burn them, and use that ash to keep the cakes alight. Crush quicklime, sieve it, roast it in a pan and let it cool, then grind and sieve it again: it makes a censer ash “clean, white and lovely”. Keep an ember in it day and night, and keep the censer covered, “for if dust gets in, it turns black”.
Paper ash, lime and wood ash in equal parts, worked with rice water and fired, fill a censer “like snow”. Blue, vermilion, soot black and earth yellow mixed into paper ash make what is called brocade ash. Paper ash roasted red-hot, or the ash of rice husks, will also do. The ash of dried pine pollen is “the cleanest of all”. Eggplant ash holds a fire, “and it burns long without going out”, and the ash of withered hollyhock “keeps a fire very well”.
In Hangzhou, the bureau a household hired for a banquet set the incense on fine ash, as The four leisurely arts tells. In one of Chen Zigao’s poems on a plum-scented incense, an old man wants only to doze after his morning porridge: “the ash warm, the incense thick, a hundred thoughts fade”.
The tools
The same volume ends with the vessels. A censer can be silver, bronze, iron, tin or stone, “whichever is convenient”, shaped as a lion, a xiezhi (a one-horned beast of legend) or a wild duck. Its head should be pierced to let the heat out, but the holes should not be large, “so that the scent turns back on itself and lasts”. Li Qingzhao’s line “the borneol melts in the golden beast” is about a censer of this kind.
The incense box should be of the same materials, but not of raw bronze, “which easily turns rank”. Two spoons are needed: a round one to level the ash and set the fire, a pointed one to divide the incense and scoop up the powder. Chopsticks are for blending and for picking incense up. A small vase, cast in metal or made of clay, holds the spoons and chopsticks. A deep jar with a lid keeps new blends while they age, buried in the ground for a month or more, as Hexiang: blended incense, worn as beads describes.
Incense laid as a script
There was a second way to burn a blend, and it used no leaf at all. Fine powder was pressed into the ash through a carved mould in one unbroken line and lit at one end, and the ember crept along the line like a slow fuse. This was seal incense, yinxiang 印香 or xiangzhuan 香篆, named after the seal script its patterns resembled. Hong Chu’s register, quoted in Chen’s fourth volume, says the moulds were carved in wood and the incense was burned at the table or before images of the Buddha, “some as much as two or three chi across”, roughly sixty to ninety centimetres.
Because a line burns at a steady pace, seal incense also kept time. The second volume describes a hundred-ke seal, after the hundred ke 刻 into which a day and a night were divided. It is cut in hard wood, mountain pear for choice, camphor or nanmu next, one chi and one cun across. Its line winds through twelve sections, one for each double hour, two chi to each and 240 cun in all. Ordinary incense would not keep time, the note says, so the powder is only two things: wild perilla leaves picked before mid-autumn, and pine cones that have dropped of themselves at the end of autumn. Shen Li, prefect of Xuancheng and the compiler of an incense register of his own, received the seal and its method from Wu Zhengzhong of Guangde and had it cut in stone in 1074, “to pass on to those who care for such things”. Another set of seals measured the five watches of the night and changed with the seasons: the longest for the weeks around the winter solstice, the flattest around the equinoxes, the shortest around the summer solstice.
The recipes for seal incense add a craftsman’s tip: mix a little almond powder into the incense, “and it will not raise dust and will come out of the mould easily”. Two Song statesmen, Zhang Quanzhen and the chancellor Zhang Deyuan, loved a blend called Zishan Hall seal incense so much that “every day a tray was burned, and the seal smoke never stopped”.
Su Shi made one for his brother’s birthday. With a sandalwood figure of Guanyin and a silver seal tray, he gave a newly blended seal incense and a poem:
A lamp like a firefly starts a small burning; when will it finish crossing the winding seal-script lines? It coils without end, joins and parts again, and drifts on through the air in a haze.
Worn, not burned
The registers keep both kinds of blend: some for the censer, some pressed into beads to wear. Our bracelets are the second kind. They are hexiang shaped into beads and dried, and they give off their scent at the warmth of the room and the wrist, with no charcoal, ash or leaf. The Song method aimed at scent without smoke. A bead gives scent without fire at all.
Our beads aren’t made to the recipes above, and they aren’t meant for the censer.
Questions
Can I burn or warm the beads? No. They are made to be worn. Keep them away from flame and heat: heat, like water and sun, makes the scent fade faster, as How long does a scented bead bracelet keep its scent? explains.
What was the mica or silver leaf for? It sat between the buried ember and the incense, so that the incense was warmed rather than burned. In the register’s words, it gave “no smoke and no scorched smell”.
Is this the Japanese incense ceremony? The arrangement is close. Japan’s kōdō still warms a sliver of wood on a small mica plate called ginyō 銀葉, “silver leaf”, over charcoal buried in ash. The Song registers describe the same layers, from the ember up: charcoal, ash, leaf and incense.
Where does Goose-Pear Canopy’s name come from? From a bed-curtain incense of the tenth-century Southern Tang court, agarwood steamed in the juice of goose pears. Goose-Pear Canopy tells its story.
Sources
- Chen Jing, Chenshi xiangpu 陳氏香譜, volume 1 (煆炭; 焚香, quoting 香史), volume 2 (百刻香印; 五更印刻; 百刻篆圖, Shen Li’s note of 1074; 定州公庫印香; 資善堂印香), volume 3 (香餅; 終日香餅; 内府香餅; 丁晉公文房七寳香餅; 香煤; 閻資欽香煤; 香灰; 香品器: 香爐, 香盛, 香匙, 香筯, 香壺, 香甖) and volume 4 (香篆, quoting 洪譜; Su Shi, 印香; Chen Zigao, 次韻蘇藉返魂梅; Li Shangyin, 燒香曲; Yang Wanli, 焚香).
- Li Qingzhao, Zui hua yin 醉花陰 (薄霧濃雲愁永晝).