Sandalwood Ritual Ancient Cypress Incense Sticks | Natural Herbal Wood - 1.06 oz

If sandalwood is the gentleman among woods, ancient cypress is the hermit — older than any gentleman, more obstinate than any recluse.

Gubai is the aged wood of Platycladus orientalis, a species endemic to China that grows so slowly a decade may add less than a centimeter to its girth. Its lineage predates human civilization — the cypress family arose in the Mesozoic era and shared the sky with dinosaurs.

The Chinese reverence for cypress is nearly as old as civilization itself. In the Zhou dynasty, the Son of Heaven burned cypress wood to send fragrant smoke to the heavens. Li Shizhen ranked cypress as "first among aromatic woods" and "king of all trees." And the oldest cypress tree still stands before the Yellow Emperor's Mausoleum — said to have been planted over five thousand years ago. The fragrance of ancient cypress does not announce itself. The opening note is crisp as herbal medicine, the heart warm as honey, the trailing note lingering like the faint wood-scent of an old temple.

In the early 1970s, Henry Kissinger visited the Temple of Heaven and remarked: "With America's resources, we could build a replica of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests — but these ancient cypresses we could never create." Yet Beijing's oldest cypress grows 150 kilometers away in Miyun. In 2020, the local government moved a road nearly twenty meters to give this 3,500-year-old tree room to breathe — rerouting a road for a tree.