About Panda Incense
We make Yao Xiang(药香), Chinese herbal incense, in the same way my family has been making it for five generations. I'm the fifth-generation inheritor of a craft China's government inscribed on its fourth national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2014. Every batch is hand-shaped, air-dried, and aged underground in clay jars for about twelve months before it ships.
Chinese incense isn’t just for scent or ritual—it has deep roots in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Ingredients like Gou-Qi, Bai-Shao, tea leaves, and various herbs are used to support the body, not just smell good. Each follows a completely different philosophy and ingredient system(In Chinese this tradition is called He Xiang (合香)). That’s something you rarely see in commercial incense outside of China.
Who's behind it
My family has been in the medicinal-herb and incense trade since the mid-Ming dynasty, and I've been running the workshop full-time since 1999. The craft is registered as traditional incense making techniques(传统香制作技艺 (药香制作技艺)), project Ⅷ-224, on the national list of intangible cultural heritage. In 2018 I was named a national-level representative inheritor.
Our workshop operates in Beijing under the names 乾恒老号 and 中华药栈. Then it spreads to Ningbo, Nanping and Hong Kong under the name 中华香局. Panda Incense is the name we use to bring the same craft to the US market.
A family line, briefly
We started in the mid-Ming period, trading medicinal herbs and making incense. The family is Hui, and the business was known then as Hui-Hui Pharmacy(回回药房). By the mid-to-late Qing we had renamed the shop 中华药栈, and from the Qian-Long era on our incense was supplied to the imperial court.
In the early years we also worked with Tong-Ren-Tang(同仁堂): they purchased herbal medicines and incense from us under the first-generation shopkeeper Xing Liushi, including pills, Ointment, powder, tooth remedy, the plaster line, and our own Yao Xiang. Today the Tong-Ren-Tang Museum in Beijing displays five Yao Xiang sticks our workshop made during the Guang-Xu reign, complete with the export seals we used to ship them.
For most of its history the craft stayed inside the family. I decided to make it more widely available because good recipes that no one outside the family can access don't survive. And what changed my mind to sell overseas was simple. I kept meeting overseas people who wanted real Chinese incense, and only find cheap, poor-quality incense on the local shelf. Then many people have a bad impression on Chinese incense. Keeping good formulas locked up didn't help anyone. So now we make them in small batches and sell them directly.
How it's made
Every batch goes through ten stages, the same way my great-great-grandparents made it for the court: material selection, washing, processing, grinding, sieving, formulation, mixing, extrusion molding, drying, packaging, and storage. Then the incense is aged underground in clay jars for about twelve months. That last step is the slow one. It's the part that takes the raw edge off the herbs and lets the scent settle into something quiet and layered.
What's not in it
Four things: synthetic fragrance oils, chemical binders, accelerants, and preservatives. The ingredient list on every product is short by design. We are a small workshop and we don't need to hide anything.
| Product | What’s in it | What’s NOT in it |
|---|---|---|
| Incense sticks | Ground herbs, natural gum binders, water | Synthetics, accelerants, artificial color |
| Incense coils | Same as above | Same as above |
| Incense aromatic accessories (bracelet, necklace pendant, earrings) | natural resin, 12–18 powdered herbs | Synthetic glue, fillers, artificial fragrance |
| Incense sachet bags | Incense pill or coarsely ground herbs, cotton fabric | Polyester, synthetic fillers |
| Sandalwood soap | Sandalwood (from 30+ year wood), plant oils, lye | Synthetic fragrance, preservatives, colorants |
| Sandalwood perfume | Pure sandalwood, water. No alcohol. No preservatives. | Alcohol, glycerin, synthetic additives |
The other reason we exist
A portion of every order goes to the Bamboo Fund, which buys fresh bamboo and supports daily care for giant pandas at Ningbo Wildlife Park, so an order from us feeds a panda too. When you support Panda Incense, you also support our nonprofit program, "Bamboo Fund"— funding fresh bamboo, habitat enrichment, and daily care for these gentle giants.
From the workshop
We have cultural display area, skill display area and product display area in each workshop.
