Qi Tu Incense Sticks | Moonlit Rest

In the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), one of China's oldest books, a strange bird appears with three heads and six tails. Its name is Qi Tu. The old story says that eating the bird would keep nightmares away. We're not suggesting you eat the bird. We turned the legend into incense instead.

Qi Tu Incense is a handmade traditional Chinese incense made with sandalwood, benzoin, atractylodes root, spikenard, and osmanthus. Its warm, woody scent with a soft floral note is made for the part of the evening when the house is quiet, but your mind isn't. Light a stick. Let the room get quieter.

Close out the last hour of the day. Sometimes the hardest part of going to sleep isn't getting into bed, because somehow your brain is still at work. The meeting from this morning, the email you forgot to send, tomorrow's to-do list, a conversation from years ago that suddenly seems worth revisiting at 2 a.m.

For centuries, traditional Chinese incense has been part of evening routines. It's not as a quick fix, but as a way of changing the atmosphere around you. A gentle scent, a slower pace, and a small signal that the day is over.

What's it smell like?

Nobody agrees on how to describe a smell. Then we invited four people, Queenie (customer service team), Kai (herbal grower), Michael (aroma evaluator) and Ann (neighbor of workshop), to share their feelings especially whatever showed up in their heads.

Queenie: Lying on the cozy couch near the window.

Kai: Feel like resting on sun-dried mountain earth, grounded and safe.

Michael: Deep night in a mountain cabin, only faint dim light.

Ann: Rainy night, the bedding feels fry.

Why I made this one?

I grew up around incense and I'm the 5th-gen. What I have never done is watch an American smell it for the first time. That sounds like a small thing. It is not, because almost everything I could tell you about Panda Incense is something you have no way to check.

There is a good reason to be careful with incense. A lot of what leaves China is a thin stick dipped in fragrance oil and dried. It smells loud for two minutes, and then the room smells like a hotel lobby. In a photograph, a one dollar box and a hundred dollar box look the same. So the fair question is the one you are already asking. How would I know what I’m getting, and what’s really in it?

Here is what I can put on the table. All our incense are made from pure herbs, ground to powder and pressed with a plant- based binder. No fragrance oil, no accelerates, and clean burn with low smoke.

I still do not know whether that is something people here want. And this is the part I am still learning. I have made incense my whole life and I have never had to explain it to someone who did not grow up around it. What a plant binder is, why a stick should not have a charcoal core, how much important a formula is. Those things are invisible in a photograph, but I think it is visible in a smell and your status can tell you.

So if you are not sure, write to us before you buy. I would rather answer twenty questions than have a box sit on your shelf unlit.

• Key botanical ingredients: Sandalwood, Benzoin, Atractylodes, Spikenard, Osmanthus
• Dimensions:
  Box of 50 sticks (Approx. 25 minutes burn time per stick).
  Box of 120 incense sticks. (Approx. 40 minutes burn time per stick)