The name “鹅梨帐中香” can be directly translated as “Pear incense used in tent”, and is the incense seen in the famous Chinese drama “Empress in the Palance” (甄嬛传) with a long history of origin.
The two core elements of this incense recipe are very obvious — pear and tent, the former being its core ingredient and the latter being where it’s used.
The recipe is created by Yu Li, the emperor of Southern Tang Dynasty, who is good at everything else other than being an emperor. He is a person with kindness and respect for life, and a famous poet with lots of pieces still read and appreciated till today.
There are debates regarding whom he created this incense recipe for, (his wife or his concubine), but it is clear that the incense is intended for better sleep and for “fun” in bed.
In ancient China, there was always a curtain around the bed creating a tent for sleep, blocking out insects and also for the imperial members, preserving privacy within.
It is common to burn incense for work in a study or outside, but also common to burn incense for a better atmosphere within the sleeping space. Initially, there were other types of “tent incense”, but Yu Li found them to be too sweet, even a bit cloying for the bedroom.
The pear blossom recipe used till today is an improvement he made to the original incense recipe. There isn’t much about what the old recipe was, probably due to the popularity of the new recipe, but one can surely tell that using “pear” is a great idea for providing sweetness.
Unlike other typical incense where all ingredients are grounded into powder and formed into a dough, incense makers actually create this pear incense by putting powder of agarwood into a pear with its pit removed and made into a bowl, with other ingredients one add for personal preference or richness in scent.
The pear with powder is steamed, so that all the juice along with all the refreshing sweetness and fruitiness is soaked into the powder, before being formed into a dough for pressing and drying.
The traditional pear blossom incense recipe uses quince, which is a type of pear that also has some medicinal efficacy, yet it is not the required choice. Variations today involve all kinds of pears, each providing a different character to the incense made.