Incense and the qin: how the burner came to stand by the qin table

The Southern Song (1127–1279). An estate outside the walls of Hangzhou, the capital. It is night, and the moon is very bright.

The master has the qin table carried out into the courtyard. On the table lies a qin, the seven-string Chinese zither, and in front of it stands a small incense burner. A servant boy loosens the ash in the burner and buries a glowing piece of charcoal in it. On top of the charcoal he lays a thin leaf of silver, and on the silver a small sliver of agarwood. There is no open flame and no smoke to speak of, only a very fine thread of fragrance rising slowly into the air.

The master waits until the scent has spread. Only then does he sit down and tune his strings.

He is particular about all this. He has written a book on how a cultivated man should collect and live, and in its chapter on the qin he says which incense to burn while playing and which to avoid. The man's name is Zhao Xihu, and the book is the Dongtian Qinglu ("Pure Records of the Cavern Heaven").

The Dongtian Qinglu

Zhao Xihu was a descendant of the founding emperor of the Song dynasty and lived in the last decades of the Southern Song. He never held high office. He spent his energy on collecting and connoisseurship instead. The Dongtian Qinglu is divided into ten sections: ancient qin, ancient inkstones, ancient bronze vessels, strange rocks, inkstone screens, brush rests, water droppers, old calligraphy, stone inscriptions old and new, and old paintings. It is the most detailed "user's manual" we have for the life of a Song scholar.

In the chapter on judging ancient qin there is this passage:

When playing the qin to the moon, one must burn incense. ... Agarwood, jiangzhen and the like are suitable. Musk should not be burned.

His reasoning is simple. Musk is too strong a smell and "disturbs the mind". Agarwood and jiangzhen are "clear and not muddy", their smoke is fine, and they suit the sound of the qin.

This passage fixed a rule for later generations of players. Incense should be lit, but it must be the right incense. If it is the wrong kind, better to light none.

The burner in Emperor Huizong's painting Listening to the Qin illustrates exactly this rule. The pale smoke in the painting rises straight up, as thin as a thread. That is the smoke of incense warmed over hidden charcoal, not of something burning in an open flame.

What incense is

What the old texts call incense was, for the most part, wood and resin.

Agarwood (chenxiang, literally "sinking fragrance"): when certain trees of the Aquilaria family are wounded, they secrete a resin, and over many years the resin-soaked wood hardens into dark, fragrant pieces. It comes from Hainan, Guangdong and Southeast Asia. Its scent is deep and long-lasting, and it is the most precious of all incense materials. Good agarwood today is sold by the gram and costs more than gold. In the Song, officials and rich merchants competed for every shipment from Hainan.

Sandalwood: the heartwood of the sandal tree, from India and Southeast Asia. Its scent is sweet and warm, and it is used a great deal in Buddhist temples.

Jiangzhen: the resin of a climbing plant that grows in the south. Song writers thought it "clear" and suited to the qin, and an ordinary scholar could afford it.

Ambergris and musk: fragrances of animal origin, the first from the sperm whale and the second from the musk deer. Both have a heavy, pungent smell, and Zhao Xihu says neither belongs near the qin.

Incense was used in several ways. The simplest was to burn chips of fragrant wood directly, which was smoky. A second was "seal incense": powdered incense was pressed into a patterned line, lit at one end, and left to burn slowly to the other, so that it could also keep time. The third, and the method the Song valued most, was to blend the materials into small pellets or slivers and warm them over charcoal buried in ash, with something between the heat and the incense. There was no open flame, the smoke was extremely fine, and what remained was mostly scent. This is the method used in the opening scene.

Incense in traditional life

Incense first belonged to sacrifice. Its smoke rose to heaven and carried messages between people and spirits. The ancient dictionary Erya says that sacrifice to heaven is called fanchai, the burning of firewood so that its smoke rises upward.

After the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), incense entered daily life. People used it to scent clothes, bedding and rooms. The Han boshan burner, its lid shaped like a mountain so that smoke curled out like cloud around peaks, was the first scholar's incense vessel.

By the Tang and Song, incense had become one of the scholar's "four idle pursuits", along with whisking tea, hanging paintings and arranging flowers (see the qin and tea). In the Song, refinement in incense reached its height. Huang Tingjian (1045–1105), poet and calligrapher, is credited with "the ten virtues of incense": it moves the spirits, purifies body and mind, dispels impurity, wakes the drowsy, is a friend in stillness, steals leisure amid the dust, does not cloy when there is much, is enough when there is little, keeps without decaying, and does no harm in constant use. Two stand out: when all is quiet it keeps you company, and when life is busy it steals a little leisure back for you. This is the same idea as Bai Juyi calling the qin and tea his companions "in fortune and failure, going and staying".

Su Shi, Huang Tingjian and Lu You all wrote poems on incense and left incense recipes. They blended their own materials like medicine and passed the formulas to friends. The poet Li Qingzhao (1084–c. 1155) wrote of "borneol melting in the golden beast", the borneol camphor smoldering in a beast-shaped burner, in a poem whose speaker spends a long gray day of "thin mist and heavy cloud" watching the smoke and feeling sad. In the Song, incense stood beside the qin, tea, calligraphy and painting as a way of living, and it was the most everyday of them all. People who could not play the qin still burned incense.

The three companions of the burner

In the Song and Ming, the incense set in front of a qin table usually had three pieces: a burner, a box, and a small vase. The vase held two tools, a pair of incense chopsticks for picking up charcoal and incense, and a small spatula for loosening and pressing the ash. This group of three was called "the burner, vase and box", and it appears often in Ming and Qing paintings and novels. In the eighteenth-century novel Dream of the Red Chamber, such a set stands on the table in the rooms of the family matriarch, Grandmother Jia.

The burner itself had to be the right shape. The Han used the boshan burner. Song taste turned to small, low ceramic burners in celadon or white porcelain, with narrow mouths, so that the smoke came out as a single fine thread. A burner in front of the qin had to be low, so as not to block the player's view and so that smoke would not drift straight onto the strings. Ash that settles on the strings gives a gritty sound when they are played.

The box held fresh incense. The chopsticks and spatula were for warming incense over hidden charcoal: burying the charcoal, pressing a shallow hollow in the ash, laying the silver leaf flat. The whole sequence took two or three minutes. Players usually did it themselves, since those minutes were a quiet sitting before playing.

The burner in Listening to the Qin is just such a low little burner. The painter left out the box and the vase, but the smoke is right.

Why it goes with the qin

Incense goes with the qin for the same reasons tea does. All three are light, all are slow, and all ask for stillness.

But incense does two things that the qin and tea do not.

The first is keeping time. A stick of incense takes a roughly fixed time to burn down, and "one stick of incense" was a common unit of time. A player who lit a stick set a limit for the sitting: when the incense was spent, the playing ended. Seal incense was more precise still. Its powder was pressed into a winding line, and how far the glow had traveled told the hour.

The second is the air. The qin is a quiet instrument, and any stray smell in the room pulls the attention away. Incense brings the whole room into a single scent, as if tuning the room to one note. This is what Zhao Xihu means when he says that musk "disturbs the mind". The incense is not there for its own fragrance but to keep other smells from intruding. A room with no smell at all does not exist. There is always cooking, damp, people. So one gentle scent is used to cover all the others, the nose grows quiet, and the ears can do their work.

Ming qin handbooks are blunter. The Taigu Yiyin ("Sounds Bequeathed from High Antiquity") opens its rules for playing with burning incense, listed alongside washing the hands and straightening one's clothes and cap. Each of these is an act that separates the player from ordinary life.

Should you light incense today

Not necessarily.

Most practice rooms today are in apartment buildings with the windows shut, where smoke soon becomes choking. Genuine agarwood is extremely expensive, and most of what is sold under that name is synthetic fragrance, which smells nothing like what the old players knew. A single stick can also give some people a headache.

So today "burn incense, play the qin" is mostly a ritual. The few seconds it takes to light a stick tell you that the playing is about to begin. Its purpose is the old one: not the fragrance, but setting oneself apart from the everyday. If you do not light incense, sitting still for a minute or tuning through the strings once does the same thing. What matters is the act of setting apart, not the incense.

Zhao Xihu's rule, "agarwood and jiangzhen are suitable, musk should not be burned", comes out in modern terms roughly as follows. If you light something, light something mild. Lighting nothing is fine too. Just do not light anything harsh.

Incense and intangible heritage

The making and use of incense has different local traditions across China, and "traditional incense-making techniques" have been placed on the intangible cultural heritage lists of several provinces and cities. Like the qin, tea and calligraphy, incense grew out of daily life, faded from it, and is now being taken up again.

A qin player does not need to understand incense. But if you know why that burner stands in Listening to the Qin, and why Zhao Xihu would not have musk near his strings, there will be one more thing in your mind as you play: a thread of smoke you cannot see, rising straight up into the moonlight.