Description of ancient incense burning

2026-01-21 07:58

In ancient times, burning incense was an activity that was rich in cultural content and a sense of ritual. First of all, incense was mostly made into incense pills or incense cakes. The process of making incense is like "refining honey into pills. The pills are as big as chicken beans. Add one tael of cooked honey into each medicine powder. Before the last pill, add more than 100 pestle and mortar. Seal it with oil paper, store it in porcelain, and burn it to make flower gas". The incense was not burned directly, but was burned across the fire. First, he had to burn the charcoal in the incense burner. After the charcoal turned into hot ashes, he would bury the charcoal (a cylindrical fuel made of charcoal powder) into the hot ashes, then poke some small holes in the hot ashes so that the charcoal would not extinguish when it came into contact with oxygen. When the charcoal was hot, he would put a fire barrier (the fire barrier was made of porcelain, mica, money, silver leaves, sand pieces, etc.), and then put the incense pills on the fire barrier and roast them with the charcoal to emit the fragrance. During this process, in order to make the fragrance linger and be pure, the fragrance could not be burned directly. It had to be heated slowly over a fire. In the process of burning incense, testing the incense was an important part. The test of incense was to test the temperature of the charcoal fire to determine the purity of the fragrance after burning the incense. Since there was no standard for the heat of the charcoal used in the incense, he had to constantly observe and test it with his hands. The Tang Dynasty poet, He Ning, described the scene of a woman testing incense in Mountain Flower. The woman stretched out her hand to test the temperature of the charcoal,"several times to test the fragrance and warm her delicate hands". There were also literati like Li Yu who believed that incense testing should be done personally. In ancient times, from the palace to the people, from the literati to the common people, there was a custom of burning incense. When the literati were meditating, reading books, reciting poems and painting, tasting tea and admiring the moon, playing the zither and playing music, they were often happy to burn incense to create a clean and elegant atmosphere, get rid of distracting thoughts in their hearts, and reach the realm of ventilation, concentration, tranquility and detachment. In the Song Dynasty, burning incense, tea, flower arrangement, and hanging paintings were called the "four nosy things". "Yun Anlu's Body Sacrifice" is equally exciting. Everyone is welcome to read it!