Why Was Incense Part of the Chinese Scholar’s Study?

A room for reading, writing, and looking

Wen lived in Suzhou, China, from the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. His Changwu zhi discusses rooms, plants, paintings, furniture, incense, and tea, setting out his detailed ideas about how to furnish and inhabit a home.^[2]

The entry on a “small room,” in the section on arrangement, gives us a place to begin: a writing desk with a narrow edge, furnished with brushes, an inkstone, an incense box, and a burner. A separate small stone table holds tea utensils. Wen wanted the objects on the desk to be “small and elegant.”^[1]

For a reader today, this is a private room that brings together reading, writing, and the pleasure of collecting. Paintings and calligraphy invite the eye; objects offer useful and pleasing forms; incense adds scent. Together, they suggest a familiar question: what kind of surroundings do I want to spend time in?

One burner, carefully placed

In his entry on placing a burner, Wen lists a single burner, incense boxes of different sizes, and a small vessel for incense tools. The boxes hold different aromatics, including agarwood and incense cakes. He objects to having two burners in the study, placing one on a table beneath a hanging painting, or arranging the vessel and boxes in facing pairs.^[1]

His attention extends to the whole arrangement. Which container holds the incense? Where do the tools go? How do these objects sit alongside a painting? Using fragrance involves choices about storage and display as well as the burner itself.

The same passage offers another memorable preference: ceramic burners in summer, copper-alloy burners in winter. Wen gives no reason for the choice, but he clearly connects the vessel with the season.^[1] A familiar room could change a little as the year turned.

These prescriptions reveal Wen’s particular eye. Number, material, and placement all express a choice. They give us a more revealing picture than the simple observation that people in the past enjoyed incense.

A landscape carved into bamboo

A surviving object offers another way into this world of taste.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a bamboo incense holder catalogued under Zhu Sansong and dated to the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. Its surface is carved with scholars among a wooded landscape.^[3]

The openwork has two roles: it forms the landscape and allows fragrance from incense sticks burning inside to escape.^[3] Function and craftsmanship meet in the same surface. The bamboo is both a container and a scene that rewards close looking.

Reading among the pleasures of incense and tea

The opening of Changwu zhi’s section on incense and tea mentions practising calligraphy by copying models, reciting verse, reading by lamplight, conversation, and walks after a meal. Wen brings incense and tea into several kinds of everyday activity.^[4]

Reading has a place among them, without becoming a prescribed sequence of steps for a special reading ritual. This offers an approachable way to understand the tradition: incense could accompany time alone or time with others, taking on meaning through the occasion.

Nor did all of this incense take the same form. The passage on burner placement lists incense cakes; the incense and tea section discusses heating aromatic material indirectly, rather than placing it directly in the fire. The museum’s bamboo holder record specifically describes incense sticks.^[1][3][4] Keeping these forms distinct helps us understand how a stick used today relates to a broader history of scent.

What a burner tells us about a room

Read together, these texts and objects give incense a tangible place in the study. It accompanies reading, writing, and tea, while bringing the storage of aromatics, the arrangement of vessels, and the appreciation of carving into everyday life. This is one way we can understand this part of the incense tradition.

Wen’s seasonal preference is particularly telling: a ceramic burner for summer, a copper-alloy one for winter.^[1] Even this small object on the desk called for a fresh choice as the seasons changed. Through that detail, we glimpse how one late Ming writer thought about living in a room—and the place incense held within it.

If you burn incense while reading today, use a stable, heat-resistant holder that catches ash, keep it away from books, paper, and textiles, ventilate the room, and remain nearby throughout. Historical desk arrangements are not instructions for safe use today. See our guide to burning incense safely at home for practical guidance.^[5][6]