Traditional, artisanal
Thirty years ago, Li Shijing was running a successful dyeing and finishing business. After being injured in an accident at work, he returned home to Pingtung to recuperate. One of his uncles, who was getting on in years, was just then planning on closing his shop that sold incense and spirit money (the kind burnt as offerings). Li decided to take it over. He was hoping to have a new start in life but ended up collapsing from exhaustion. Without hesitation, Kang Xiuhua resigned from her job as a high-school teacher and returned home to help her husband with the business.
“Back then we often had sales of only NT$400 a day,” Kang Xiuhua recalls. Noting that profit margins are low with cheap incense, Kang explains that they decided instead to move toward incense made with ingredients from Chinese herbal medicines. What’s more, they picked a younger crowd as target customers, and then aggressively pushed to open the market using strategies such as digitized warehouse controls, open shelving, and transparent pricing and delivery services.
After several years of hard work and gradually growing sales, they were battered by a wave of low-cost imports from mainland China that really put the squeeze on Taiwan’s incense industry. Media reports described how much of the incense on the market, due to its chemical components and low-quality artificial fragrances, produced toluene, formaldehyde, acetone and other carcinogens when burned. These health concerns led to a sudden downturn in the incense industry, with sales plummeting by 70–80%. Li and Kang were close to calling it quits.
In July of 2012, 10 local firms that were interested in promoting traditional methods of producing incense banded together to form the Pingtung Incense Association. Members exchange techniques in producing traditional handmade incense, hoping to raise the level of the industry by investing it with cultural meaning.
Traditional incense manufacturers aim to produce incense with “sufficient scent, a round cylindrical shape, and a beautiful handle.”
The creation of incense starts with the sticks, which are created from three-millimeter-wide strips of bamboo. These are soaked in oil, and dipped in incense powder before being left to dry in the sun. It takes real skill to be able dip a bunch of bamboo sticks into the incense powder without having them stick together.
In the 15 steps of incense manufacture, two key steps are spreading the incense sticks like a fan in your hand, and shaking off the excess powder. Only by spreading the sticks in this way can one apply the incense powder evenly to all of them without having them stick together. After applying the powder, you’ve got to shake them vigorously to remove the excess incense powder.
The traditional manufacture of incense sticks involves apprentices learning from masters. After entering the profession, one spends all one’s days battling with the incense ingredients and dust. You’ve got to get up at 4 a.m. to go to work. Before the sun comes up, you’ve got to ready the incense so it can be exposed to the sun. Old masters develop a sixth sense that is far superior to a weather report: When the wind shifts, they can quickly tell that rain is coming and that they need to bring the incense indoors. If rain were to fall before the incense were in, then all of their hard work up to that point would have been for naught.
Apart from reviving the traditional techniques, association members have obtained SGS certification and registered a certification mark so that consumers can feel confident that their incense is of high quality and free of toxic chemical additives. Incense artisan and retailer Wang Shunfang notes, “Our family has made incense for generations. My father lived to 90, and his older brother lived to 100. Their longevity is the best demonstration of the healthiness of their incense!”
The incense making process: 1.Soaking in oil 2.Applying incense powder 3.“Spreading the fan” 4.Straightening up 5.Sun drying 6.Dyeing the handles 7.Applying gold paint to the ends