Sandalwood Ritual Hainan Agarwood Incense Sticks | Premium Oud Fragrance - 1.06 oz

Of all agarwood in the world, Hainan's reigns supreme — the Chinese have been saying this for nearly a thousand years.

Ding Wei, a prime minister of the Northern Song, was exiled to Yazhou — the darkest hour of his career — yet in the mountains of Hainan, he encountered the most extraordinary fragrance of his life. He wrote Tianxiang Zhuan (Chronicle of Heavenly Incense), the first monograph dedicated to Hainan agarwood, declaring it "unrivaled under heaven." In it, he tells a story: an Arab merchant, driven ashore by a typhoon, challenged the locals to a fragrance contest. Hainan's agarwood produced smoke "drifting heavenward as though drawing from the Eastern Sea," while the Arab's incense hung heavy and failed to rise. This may well have been the world's first blind tasting.

But the man who gave Hainan agarwood its soul was Su Dongpo. In 1098, exiled to Danzhou, he sent his brother Su Zhe a carved agarwood mountain as a sixtieth-birthday gift, with the Ode to the Agarwood Mountain: "Firm as gold and lustrous as jade, with the bones of a crane and the sinews of a dragon." He was praising agarwood — but also his brother, and their shared fate: born of the wilderness yet unsurpassed in quality. Li Shizhen, the great Ming physician, pronounced the final judgment in his Bencao Gangmu: "Champa is inferior to Zhenla; Zhenla is inferior to Hainan's Li Valley... a single piece worth ten thousand coins, the finest under heaven."

The Qing imperial household kept a meticulous monthly incense quota. But the Fengxian Hall, where the imperial ancestors were worshipped, received far more top-grade agarwood than the living emperor and empress. In the eyes of the Qing emperors, the dead needed finer incense than the living. Tiny Yazhou in Hainan alone bore a crushing quota of thirteen jin; during the Kangxi reign, the prefect Zhang Zhuoshi risked his life to petition the throne for a reduction.