How Did People Read Incense Smoke?

Search "how to read incense smoke" and you mostly get omens. Smoke curls one way, splits another, and someone will tell you what each shape means. People were watching incense smoke long before they read it for signs. Buyers used it to sort good wood from bad.

Why did they watch the smoke?

Because smoke was the only part you could see. Aromatics sold by smell, and no two people smell a wood the same way. A buyer could say the wood smelled wrong, but the dealer would not drop his price for it. They judged it by smoke, and everybody watched the same smoke.

Ding Wei was a court official in the Northern Song, and he wrote about the aromatic wood trade in his Tianxiang Zhuan. One of his notes records about a ship blown off course to Hainan. The owner of the ship tried to show off at a banquet there, so he put out a lavish spread. The locals admitted they could not match him on money, but about the wood, they agreed with each other. They looked at his burner. The smoke was thick and would not rise, dry, thin and scorched (爐煙蓊鬱不舉、乾而輕、瘠而燋). Not fine, they said.

So they burned their own wood from the north shore of the island instead. This time the smoke rose high and kept going. It looked thick and wet, and the scent held and got better the longer it burned (高煙杳杳、濃腴湒湒、持久益佳). The visitors had nothing to say after that, because the smoke had settled which wood was better.

What did good incense smoke look like?

Those three were the standard for good smoke.

Fan Chengda was posted to Guangxi in the 1170s, near a port where aromatic wood came in by the boatload. He spent years around the trade and wrote down what he learned. The wood he rated highest came from Hainan. The scent was clear and gentle from start to finish, he wrote, more like lotus, plum blossom, pear or honeycomb than anything else. One small piece would fill a room (芬囂彌室), and if you turned the piece over, the smell was the same from every side (翻之四面悉香). 

He added one test that was harder than others: right down to the ash, the air never turns acrid (至煤燼氣不焦). Ash is where a burnt smell would show up first, so he took it as the best evaluation about a material. Most wood smelled rank and fierce, and the milder pieces had no staying power.

In his notes, fierce did not mean strong. A scent could be strong and still be good. The poor grades had lost the clear note, and once the strength faded there was little left.

What turned the smoke acrid?

A burnt smell came from one of three things: too much raw wood, too much heat, or an uneven grind. All three were known to the people who handled the wood. The man at the burner usually knew which one he was smelling.

Fan Chengda wrote it in five characters: Wood that still carries its tree nature will have a burnt tail in its smoke (帶木性尾煙必焦). Shen Li's Xiangpu says that roast the material over a slow fire, because a fire that is too close brings out a scorched smell (煼香宜慢火，如火緊則焦氣). Yan Bowen wrote that incense materials should be ground to an even texture. Ground too fine and the plume will not hold. Ground too coarse and the separate scents never knit together (太細則烟不永，太粗則氣不和).

What does incense smoke mean today?

Somewhere along the way, smoke came to mean something else as well. Search for it now and most of what you find is about omens. A plume that rises straight, a plume that splits, a plume that drifts back toward you: each is said to mean something different, depending on which tradition you are reading in.

None of that comes out of the old books on aromatic wood. Those were written by men who bought in bulk and sold by the piece. What they looked for in a plume was whether the material had been kept, ground and burned the way it should be.

In the end, the smoke was the only part of the business a buyer could see. He could not see how the wood had been kept, how finely it had been ground, or how hot the fire was underneath. That is why anyone bothered to watch. Check incense sticks we make.

FAQ

Does a plume that rises straight mean anything? In the trade notes, a rising plume meant the wood had been handled well. It said nothing about the future. They never say a plume predicts anything.

Is a scorched smell a sign of bad material? Two different things get called this. One is material that is genuinely poor, with a lot of raw wood in it or a batch that was never prepared well. That will smell scorched however you burn it.

The other is good material pushed too hard. Too much heat under it, or a grind that came out too fine or too coarse. Fan Chengda's line about ash that never turns acrid was written about the finest material he could find.

Where do these notes come from? Four of them come from books on the aromatic wood trade, written between the 1000s and the 1200s: Ding Wei's Tianxiang Zhuan, Fan Chengda's Gui Hai Yu Heng Zhi, Shen Li's Xiangpu, and Yan Bowen's Xiangshi. The four of them span about a hundred and fifty years.

The fifth writer was not in the trade at all. Gao Lian wrote about burning incense at home, in a book on the quiet life finished in the 1590s. Four of them sold wood for a living and one burned it at home, and all five watched the same smoke.