Song Dynasty Agarwood Craft: Why the Process Remains Undecided

On the matter of making agarwood, the ancients left many records, yet the processes that can be matched up have long been disputed. The dispute lies not in the craft itself, but in whether the things several key terms point to are the same thing. Laying this out today is meant to give newcomers in the industry a reference: how a record should be read, and at what point one should stop.

Su Xun of the Northern Song wrote a seven-character regulated verse titled simply 'Agarwood.' The two lines recording the process read: 'Pound musk and sift sandalwood into the mold; moisten with rose dew and blend with jisu.' Eight characters can be broken into four steps: the materials must be pounded, sifted fine, and loaded into a mold; after loading, they must be moistened with dew and combined with fragrant herbs.

The material names are kept as in the ancient text: musk is musk deer secretion, sandalwood is sandalwood, rose dew is rosewater, and jisu is a fragrant herb. The name jisu has been interpreted differently by various scholars—some say water mint, some say clove, and there are other explanations. We will not decide on one here.

The next two lines describe the fire: 'A thread exhales fine blue smoke; half a stick burns down to the thickness of a jade chopstick.' The remaining stub after half a stick burns is as thick as a jade chopstick. This line also has another printing as 'jade chopstick thick,' both writings saying the same thing. Which is the original text, I do not judge.

The real controversy centers on the third section: does this count as incense sticks or not?

One school holds that this is incense sticks. Fan Zhen, in 'A Study of Incense Sticks,' proposes that the Northern Song 'Wujing Zongyao' already records the jijian (a piston syringe), and that the mold in the poem is the jijian. The other school disagrees. The expert on ancient objects Yang Zhishui, in 'New Evidence on Ancient Poetry and Objects,' says the production method described in this poem does not resemble the later use of the jijian, so what is written is not incense sticks.

There is also a reason on the timeline. The Song Dynasty was the peak era for aromatics, yet the two characters 'incense stick' do not appear in the literature; the term clearly appears in the Yuan Dynasty. By the Ming Dynasty, Li Shizhen's 'Compendium of Materia Medica,' in its entry on incense sticks, writes that they are pressed into incense sticks with a jijian, formed into strips like threads.

We cannot verify which of the three accounts is correct, so we merely lay them out without drawing a conclusion. One note on the search boundary mentioned earlier: 'the term incense stick does not appear in Song Dynasty literature' is the search conclusion of the cited article's author, not a conclusion we reached by going through Song Dynasty literature ourselves. This distinction is rarely written about in industry articles, but it should be.

So what use is this record to today's agarwood makers? I think what is useful is its method of description. For the four steps, it writes actions, not adjectives: pound, sift, load into mold, moisten and blend. Craft processes record actions; product descriptions in the industry record selling points. The two kinds of recording serve different audiences, and mixing them produces claims like 'ancient-method restoration' that no one can verify.

On the practical level, what is common in the industry now is the forming method: powder is pressed into strips through a mold, the strip body is firm, and when burned the smoke is fine and the ash line straight. Products formed by pressing are classified in the industry by forming method. This layer can be seen from a cross-section—compacted powder particles with uniform granules indicate press-forming, while visible fibers or obvious layering indicate another method. This is only for judging the forming method, not for judging authenticity or grade; these are two different matters.

Another thing industry articles should always have on hand is the bad habit of overclaiming. The history of incense-making is long and the crafts many; what is easiest to write are assertions that sound impressive but are backed by neither a lineage nor a test report. Once questioned, they do not hold up. The truly steady practice in the industry is to write clearly what can be verified and to note what cannot be verified as a citation.

One last point for content creators: when the same matter has two accounts, laying the two columns side by side withstands scrutiny better than picking one as definitive. What readers see is not authority, but the true state of this record—it has always been disputed.

To learn more practical content on incense-making and appreciation, feel free to browse past issues on our site.