Ji Han: Botanist
Ji Han (Western Jin), one of the key figures in the history of Chinese incense culture(香学).
Ji Han · Western Jin
Identity:Botanist
Representative incense works / incense matters:Records of the Plants of the South
Ji Han's Records of the Plants of the South documents the fragrant woods of Jiaozhi and the South Sea regions (such as the honey-fragrance tree—the source of agarwood and ji-gu incense), making it an early natural history text recording the origins of Lingnan aromatics and providing the earliest material clues for later generations to understand the native environments of agarwood and sandalwood.
And Chinese incense culture(香学)
Seen through Ji Han, Chinese incense culture(香学) is not an isolated craft, but a process in which generations of literati and artisans continuously documented, systematized, and spiritualized olfactory experience. Only by understanding these pioneers can one understand the weight of the wisp of incense in hand today.
Representative incense formulas · Incense poems · Incense treatises
On Incense"Records of the Plants and Trees of the Southern Regions"
Ji Han"Records of the Plants and Trees of the Southern Regions"Records of fragrant woods in Lingnan: "The honey-fragrance tree, when a thousand-year-old trunk is cut down and left, one returns after four or five years to look; it has rotted away, and only the hard black heartwood remains, which sinks when placed in water and is called agarwood; what floats is chicken-bone incense and yellow-ripe incense." This is the earliest documentary record of agarwood formation and its grades.