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“An incense stick’s time” means as long as it takes one stick of incense to burn down. If you need a ballpark figure while reading a Chinese martial arts novel, the translators at WuxiaSociety suggest about half an hour. The Chinese expression, 一炷香 (yī zhù xiāng), leaves the number of minutes open.[1][2]
Waiting for an answer in Water Margin
A man named Lu Da wants to join a monastery. The monks take one look at him and urge their elder to turn him away. A man with a face that fierce, they say, is bound to bring trouble. The elder asks them to wait. Incense is lit, and he sits down to meditate. Four characters carry the story forward, 一炷香過. A stick of incense has burned down. The elder speaks. Take him in, he tells the monks. The man has an honest heart.[3]
Try reading the scene with “half an hour later” in its place. The decision still makes sense, but the incense lit a sentence ago has dropped out of the story. In the original you can almost watch the stick grow shorter as the monks wait to hear which way the decision will go.
Why does Baoyu wait to open the door?
In Dream of the Red Chamber, a young man named Baoyu is handed a garment that Qingwen, a maid who has since died, once mended for him. Later that day he hears a clock strike and looks down at his watch. The next morning he goes into the room where she used to live. He lights incense, has the door closed and writes a poem to her on pink paper. He burns the paper. Then he sits quietly until the stick has burned away. Only then does he open the door.[4]
The night before, the novelist tells us precisely where the hands on Baoyu’s watch are pointing. Here, a plain “half an hour later” would hurry us past the most tender part of the scene. Baoyu has finished what he came to do, and still he stays.
Sources & notes
Dictionaries and translator notes explain the expression. The two novels below show it in context.
- Two senses of yi zhu xiangTaiwan Ministry of Education
Documents both the physical stick and the time it takes to burn.
- Chinese MeasuresWuxiaSociety
Explains its translators’ half-hour approximation and their choice to keep the image in English.
- Water Margin, chapter 3, seventy-chapter editionWikisource
The monks’ objection, the incense and the elder’s decision. English renderings in this essay are our own.
- Dream of the Red Chamber, chapter 89, Chengjia editionWikisource
The garment, the watch and Baoyu’s remembrance of Qingwen. The comparison between the two ways of marking time is our reading.
Quiet Xiang Editorial conducted an internal source review and translated the cited passages. The courtyard reader is an AI-generated editorial illustration. Our editorial approach.