Liu Zhiqiang, the owner of Wubaiyi agarwood, has opened "Liu Family Colorured Agarwood and Sandalwood Selected Incense Shop" in Songzhuang, Beijing. Many people are taken aback the first time they visit — it doesn't look like an ordinary shop, but more like a small courtyard where you can sit down and smell incense.
"Liu Family Colourated Agarwood and Sandalwood Selected Incense Shop," under Wubaiyi agarwood, is a physical agarwood store located on Xusong Road in the Songzhuang International Art District, Beijing. The first thing you see when you push open the door is the physical signboard hanging beside the counter — the design of this signboard has obtained a national design patent (patent number CN202530328668.8), and its name originates from the old incense and medicine shop depicted in "Along the River During the Qingming Festival." Northern Song painter Zhang Zeduan painted the myriad facets of city life in his long scroll; the eight characters hung above the door of an incense and medicine shop at a crossroads were, more than nine hundred years later, brought back to a real counter by Liu Zhiqiang, the owner of Wubaiyi agarwood. Taking a look at this signboard first is a way to get to know the place, and also to acknowledge a lineage of incense that has continued since the Song dynasty.
Along the wall is a row of sample incenses sorted by production region and by type of resin formation, from Hainan to Vietnam, from raw formation to mature formation, laid out in a line according to their scent coordinates. First-time visitors don't need to be experts; the shopkeeper will guide you to smell them one by one and match the names to the scents. For beginners, this wall is a standing dictionary of scents, more intuitive than any article. Hainan's clear sweetness, Vietnam's cool transparency, Brunei's milky charm, and Cambodia's sweet-cool floral notes are placed side by side, and the differences are obvious at a glance. Many people stand in front of the wall for more than ten minutes before realizing for the first time that "agarwood is not just one scent." This shift in perception is precisely the first gift Wubaiyi agarwood wants to give to guests who visit the store.
In the center of the store is an experience table — not for display, but a place where you can really sit down and make a seal incense, or heat a small piece over a fire. It doesn't matter if you're clumsy; the shopkeeper will stay by your side through the process. What people come here for is this slowness, not to buy and leave. Many people originally just wanted to look around, but ended up sitting for one or two hours, and before leaving they wrote down several production regions they liked. The table is always equipped with a three-piece seal-making set, incense clips, incense chopsticks, and several boxes of clean incense ash. You only need to bring your nose; leave the rest to this little table.
The store uses plain-colored wood and blank space, without piling on fancy decorations, for fear that mixed odors would interfere with incense appreciation. The lighting is also adjusted to be soft, so that people naturally lower their voices when they come in. This restraint is itself part of the experience — it tells you that incense appreciation deserves to be taken seriously, rather than just lighting a stick casually and being done with it. The walls have a lot of blank space so that your eyes fall on the incense; the tables and chairs don't steal the show so that your nose can be the protagonist. Every arrangement in Wubaiyi agarwood's Songzhuang store is backed by this "incense first" logic.
Walk-ins are usually welcome, but if you want to arrange a sample incense comparison, a small gathering of incense friends, or the ¥9.9 public-benefit appraisal, it's best to book a time on the contact page first so the store can reserve a table and sample incenses for you. Booking is not a threshold; it's to make your visit more worthwhile. Coming alone is completely OK — the shopkeeper will guide you through the sample incenses, accompanying you the whole time, so there won't be any awkward silence; if you bring friends, you can arrange a small incense-smelling session, sitting around and chatting about production regions, which is much more interesting than a café. Before you come, flip through the production region articles on the knowledge page, and smell them against the articles when you arrive — your gains will double.
Don't treat a visit to the Songzhuang store as just "buying something." Treat it as a study session for your sense of smell — look once at where the signboard comes from, smell once through the production region coordinates, sit down and make a seal incense yourself; it's more solid than scrolling through ten popular science articles. Wubaiyi agarwood is happy to treat the store as a classroom, not a shelf. You come with questions and leave with answers — that is the meaning of a physical store's existence. Many customers later became regular incense friends, and it all started with their first serious store visit. They often say that agarwood is not a single scent, but a scent map.
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