UC Santa Barbara

This study demonstrates how the sense of smell and scented substances were integral in shaping Chinese religious practice from the late Warring States through the early Six Dynasties. It challenges the prevailing assumption that the quintessential Chinese religious act always involved burning incense. To destabilize this view, this work examines the competing beliefs, attitudes, and practices that developed in the early medieval period regarding the use of smell to aid in the communication with spirits and other divine beings. To set a comparative baseline, this study establishes that the dominant olfactory practice of ancient state sacrifice was the creation of food aromas to draw down and nourish the spirits. Against conventional belief, there is little evidence incense was used in sacrifice or as a tool to communicate with the divine until the Eastern Han. Furthermore, previous to this period, textual, archaeological, and art historical evidence supports a view that censers were primarily used to perfume and fumigate garments and thus employed as safeguards against foul odor and illness. Moreover, when incense was finally adopted into sacrificial and ritual settings, it was not a substitute for sacrificial blood offerings. Its use was motivated by different ritual logics no longer concerned with spiritual alimentation, but with a broader array of communicative acts, including signaling the presence of divine beings, symbolizing the purity of the adept, or functioning as a medium to carry messages heavenward. In terms of the historical material culture of smell, this study further argues that there is no evidence of significant trade in supra-regional aromatics during the Western Han, in spite of common belief that the territorial conquests of Emperor Wu (r. 157–87 BCE) led to the reception of many diplomatic tributary gifts of incense. Such views are rooted in Six Dynasties “tales of the strange” about Emperor Wu and other cultural heroes who are portrayed as using incense or other scented materials. Subsequently, these stories are better read as reflecting the rapidly changing smellscape of early medieval China, not the past historical events of the Han. As a result, this study establishes that the late Eastern Han and early Six Dynasties were critical in the development of a new medieval smell culture and shared cultural imagination around olfaction and religious practice. These periods were not only important for the introduction of Buddhism, a tradition guided by distinctive cultural ideas concerning fragrant smelling divinity and ritual logics regarding smell, but also for a quickly growing trade in supra-regional aromatics, especially tropical tree resins, gums, and scented woods, that were markedly different to the eye and nose of medieval Chinese consumers. These goods both stimulated a creative literary output about their strange properties and eventually became the primary objects of interest for elite perfuming arts during the Song. Lastly, these external forces coincided with ongoing exchanges of ideas and practices across the northern and southern parts of Han China, regions with distinctive types of scented flora and different emphases on how to deploy them to commune with the divine. Notably, this includes the often-overlooked importance of shamanic adornment with scented plants and lustration with fragrant waters. When new autochthonous religious groups start to appear in the Eastern Han, they will be shown to embrace different beliefs and attitudes about the use of incense and smell. This includes the southern alchemical tradition and the “nameless” religions of Jiangnan which emphasized bodily hygiene and ritual purity as well as Supreme Purity Daoists who valued incense’s ability to function as a messenger to a bureaucratized world of spirits. All of these olfactory discourses intermingled during the first four centuries of the common era to create a complex tapestry of ritual practices around smell. The end of this study offers a historical introduction to the genre of Chinese perfuming manuals and a translation of the earliest extant edition, the Materia Aromatica, compiled by the official Hong Chu (1066–c.1127) in the early twelfth century. Additional commentary has been added to selected entries focusing on the ancient and medieval history of the respective item, oftentimes drawing from a range of ancient and medieval poetry, medical texts, and regional gazetteers. I have also drawn extensively from the Chinese Buddhist and Daoist canons to help bridge the current divide between scholars of Chinese religion and scholars of Chinese scent culture.