The Other Incense Road

The Other Incense Road.

"And when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh."

The Incense Road typically refers to the trade routes connecting the Horn of Africa, the southern Arabian Peninsula, and the Mediterranean basin—a network of land and sea paths centered on the trade of aromatic resins from the Burseraceae family, most notably myrrh and frankincense. The resin trade of Western Asia is as ancient as civilization itself, intertwined with the rise of the first empires and the domestication of the dromedary. Cargoes by sea and land fed the altars of the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia, and later, the Hellenistic, Persian, and Roman worlds.

The route familiar to us today, winding through the desert cities of Southern Arabia, the Hejaz, Edom, and the Negev, stretches across some 3,000 kilometers, not counting its maritime branches. It reached its peak during the Roman Empire, when massive shipments of resin were dispatched across vast distances to perfume the Mediterranean. But there was another incense road—somewhat forgotten, yet no less significant.

Chinese frankincense culture dates back to at least the third century. It is highly probable that the secret of using Arabian resins migrated to China via the religious, commercial, and medical figures of Western Asia. These migrants—monks of the Church of the East, Manichaean elects, and perhaps even Buddhist missionaries—dotted the route from Central Asia to China proper with institutions that served as spiritual, commercial, and medical hubs.

The earliest mention of frankincense in Chinese records appears in the third century, where the resin is called "xun-lu," a possible echo of its Sanskrit name (kunduruka) or Persian name (kundur). This likely referred to the local Indian species, Boswellia serrata. As is common in the Chinese literary tradition, the name changed during the Tang Dynasty to its current form, "ru-xiang" (乳香)—"milky incense." This term perhaps reflects its Arabic-Semitic name, "luban" (cognate with the Hebrew "levonah"), referring primarily to the resin produced from the B. sacra species in Southern Arabia and related species from the Horn of Africa.

The complex range of names for frankincense in China reflects the hybrid network of roads through which the prized resin reached the Middle Kingdom. Much like the routes of Western Asia, this network combined sea and land paths depending on the actors and conditions of the time. For most of the period of indirect trade, India, Sumatra, and Central Asia served as vital transit stations. From there, large quantities of frankincense flowed—mediated by Romans, Iranians, and Indians—into desert trade routes and through seaports. This complex dynamic is reflected in Chinese trade records and archaeological finds from burial sites and monastery ruins across the Southern Seas, the heartland, and the western frontier.

In China, frankincense and myrrh integrated seamlessly into the culture of body and soul, their rich smoke increasingly used in religious rites and court life. By the Tang Dynasty, frankincense was used to perfume clothes, palace halls, and even walls, as well as in Buddhist, Daoist, and "Three Persian Religion" ceremonies. Frankincense later became an integral part of Chinese medicine, a development that beautifully anticipates modern knowledge regarding the antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and antibacterial properties of the resin, which is saturated with boswellic acid.

While space is too limited to detail every shift in these trade routes, the overland route of the late Tang and Song dynasties serves as a compelling case study. This period is particularly interesting because Eurasia experienced significant political and economic shocks, including the An Lushan Rebellion in Northern China, the Abbasid Revolution, the rise of Islamic Central Asia, and the fall of the Second Turkic Khaganate—a transcontinental upheaval that may have actually intensified trade dynamics in the heart of Asia.

The entrenchment of Islam in Central Asia led to significant shifts in the region's ethnic and religious composition, replacing old trade centers and their elites. However, interregional trade remained a top priority for many of these new entities, which hurried to re-establish trade relations with the dynastic centers in China.

For example, the Karakhanids—among the first Turkic states to adopt Islam—did their utmost to be accepted as trade partners by the Song courts. Karakhanid tribute missions included not only horses, jade, coral, and amber, but also vast quantities of frankincense—sometimes reported to be as much as 6,000 kg in a single mission, a load requiring a caravan of dozens of camels just for the resin. The Karakhanid caravans are the best documented, but they follow occasional records of earlier, mostly Iranian and pre-Islamic missions, which carried substantial amounts of myrrh, frankincense, and other luxury goods unique to Western Asia.

While logic suggests that the lion's share of the overland trade began in the ports of the Persian Gulf or the markets of Western India, a review of the routes through the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, and Southern Iran raises the possibility that some frankincense arrived via entirely overland routes, all the way from the source. If so, the Chinese Incense Road represents one of the longest and most complex trade routes in history, spanning at least 700 years.

The frankincense trade, by sea and land, through the territories of Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Indians, serves as an early example of trade that encompassed vastly different ecological and cultural zones—from the deserts of Africa and Arabia, through the monsoon coasts of India and Sumatra, across the arid mountain ranges of Central Asia, to the plains of Central China. This system involved diverse actors in a spectrum of cooperation and competition, blending political hegemony, geographical knowledge, and raw commercial instinct.

The pan-Asian resin trade, an occasionally irreplaceable lubricant in the wheels of Eurasian ritual, diplomacy, and commerce, shows how a seemingly simple product can catalyze significant movements across a continent. The Chinese "frankincense embargo" imposed on Turkic caravans at the beginning of the 11th century reflects strategic gaps unique to that time, yet it echoes themes that remain entirely familiar today.

The continued use of Arabian frankincense in Chinese and Tibetan traditions remains a distant, smoke-covered flicker of a vanished world—one whose delicate fragrance still drifts like a fleeting shadow across the length of Asia.