Preface to Scents of China
Xuelei Huang’s Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023. The author asked me to write a preface for the Chinese translation. I felt deeply honoured and happily agreed. The Chinese edition will be published in June 2026.
Preface to the Chinese translation of Scents of China
David Howes, FRSC
My next-door neighbour’s father and mother from Hunan are currently visiting her and her two sons here in Quebec. I sometimes see the father returning from his morning walk as I head off to the university on my bike. We exchange greetings: “你好”; “Bonjour!” Over tea one November afternoon – with my neighbour translating – I asked the parents to consider the following question: What smell did you like the most and what smell did you most dislike before 1978 and after 1978? My neighbour got back to me a few days later with their responses. Her father had told her that before 1978 the smell he liked most was “the smell of meat” and he most disliked “the taste of hunger.” After 1978, his favourite aroma has been “the smell of wine” and he deeply dislikes “the smell of smog.” Her mother said that before 1978 the scent she liked the most was “the smell of jasmine” and she detested “the oppressive smell.” Since 1978, her favourite smell is still “the smell of jasmine,” and what she most dislikes is “the smell of money.” I will come back to these responses toward the end of this preface.
There are three important works in the cultural history of smell: Le miasme et la jonquille: l’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe – XIXe siècles (1982) by Alain Corbin; Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (1994) by Constance Classen et al.; and now the present work, Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell (2023) by Xuelei Huang. Corbin is the godfather of the cultural history of smell, and Classen the godmother. Her book also introduced the anthropology and sociology of olfaction, which disrupted the monopoly that the discipline of psychology has long exercised over the study of the senses and perception in the West. Huang’s book introduces a further shift, by correcting for the Eurocentrism that formerly prevailed in this area of study. It is complemented by another book, which Huang co-edited with Shengqing Wu, entitled Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (2023). These two books herald what I have called “the coming sensorial revolution in Chinese studies” (Howes 2025), and opened the way for the pursuit of a global cultural history of smell – a major breakthrough.
The idea of a history of smell might seem counter-intuitive, for smells are fugacious: they vanish in the same moment they are perceived. However, they leave traces in language and literature, and from these traces it is possible to reconstruct the sensoria of past epochs. In “The Shifting Sensorium,” Walter J. Ong defined the sensorium as “the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex,” and proposed that “differences in culture … can be thought of as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture” (Ong, 1991: 28). By way of example, take the history of the character “香” as analyzed by Anran Feng et al. in “Tracing the Scent” (2026) Judging from the form of the mark for “scent” on oracle bone inscriptions, the original meaning of the term had to do with the aromatic fragrance of ripened millet crops. It can be inferred that the mark depicted grains presented in vessels for sacrificial purposes. The mark subsequently evolved to become the ideogram 香 and acquired the meaning of a pleasant or “sweet” taste in the mouth. Other associations followed as 香 developed beyond signifying delicious and savory flavors to representing pleasant, aromatic smells to characterizing objects connected with women (e.g. “fragrant silk” signified fine silk fabric) and describing beauty. “Overall,” Feng et al. conclude, “the evolution of 香 reflects the ancient Chinese pursuit of a beautiful life and an appreciation for sensory pleasure.”
China has a very rich smell culture and history, centring on the use of incense. Interestingly, in addition to being used in ritual, incense was used to tell time. Calibrated sticks of incense gave off different aromas as they burned down to demarcate the different times of day. That was before the arrival of European traders and Christian missionaries, who introduced mechanical clocks (referred to as zimingzhong on account of their chimes). The odorization and sonification of time has since given way to reading (i.e., visualizing) time on the face of a clock. Imagine how much more sensuous and evocative it would have been to smell the passage of time than to picture and quantify or objectify time, as in the present.
It is fascinating to study the exchanges between China and Europe during the early modern period (Howes 2023: 177-207). China exported silk, gold, lacquerware, porcelain and tea to Europe and imported silver, technologies, glassware, textiles and wine. This resulted in a serious trade imbalance, largely because Chinese goods were so much more sensorially appealing than European goods, and hence in demand. China subsequently withdrew from world trade, and was only compelled to open its borders once again by the Opium Wars, on far less advantageous terms than previously.
It is possible to discern other shifts in the Chinese sensorium, as Huang and Wu document in Sensing China. There they argue that social transformations are always complemented by — and derive much of their force from — transformations in the life of the senses. For example, there was the alleged decadence of the bourgeois sensorium during the Republican Era, the asceticism of the socialist sensorium following the Chinese Communist Party coming to power, and the new hedonism of “capitalism with Chinese characteristics” in the period since 1978. All of these sensory regimes were erected atop the scaffolding of the elaborate correspondences between colours, sounds, scents, directions, seasons and the five “elements” (Wood, Fire, Earth, Water and Metal) given in classical Chinese cosmology, which was bound up with the Confucian social order.
In the present inquiry into the effluvia of modern Chinese history, Huang begins with a close reading of the olfactory demarcation of time and space as well as the material culture of perfume in the eighteenth century novel Dream of the Red Chamber. Subsequent chapters delve into the colonization of smell – specifically, the public hygiene measures introduced by the British colonizers who held that “China stinks!” and needed to be deodorized; the commodification of smell and “re-perfuming China” as a craving for introduced Parisian perfumes and English scented soap bars as well as domestically produced jasmine moisturizers escalated; the eroticization of smell on the part of the Chinese modernists of the 1920s, whose “biophilia” (or obsession with “biological” odors of libido) clashed with the Confucian tradition of civilized olfactory pleasure; and, the politics of olfaction under the dictatorship of Chairman Mao Zedong. Throughout, Huang traces how the twin themes of purity and contamination played off each other, as the Chinese sensorium was gradually brought into alignment with the “olfactory revolution” (Corbin) in other parts of the world. Of particular interest is the way she digs down to uncover how “culture tunes our neurons” in communist as in capitalist modernity, but the olfactory revolution remains unfinished because of the intrinsically transgressive (boundary-crossing) power of smell
By way of closing, let us circle back to the olfactory likes and dislikes of my neighbour’s parents. The father, like most members of his generation (when they were young) had been ordered by the Chinese Communist Party to go out from the city to the countryside, there to live in villages with peasant farmers and be “re-educated.” Starvation stalked the countryside: “the taste of hunger” loomed large in people’s minds. Fast forward to today: when I went for tea at my neighbour’s house the other day, the father could not join us immediately, because he was cooking. I heard sizzling sounds coming from the kitchen. When he appeared, his face was beaming. It was the same radiant expression as when I encountered him in the morning on his way back from practising Tai Chi in Westmount Park. Post-1978, when a capitalist-industrial sensorium started to supplant the former communist-agrarian sensorium, “the smell of smog” took the place of “the taste of hunger” in his calculus of olfactory dislikes.
The mother, whom I sometimes see together with her grandsons walking back from Selwyn House (where the boys go to school) had a set preference for the scent of jasmine before and after 1978. Her dislikes were a mystery to me, until her daughter explained: “the oppressive smell” referred to the suffocating atmosphere of various struggles before 1978, when everyone’s spirit was on edge, according to the mother. “The taste of money” relates to how, in the mother’s experience, after 1978, all Chinese people had only one goal: to make money. Gradually, money replaced almost everything else, she said.
After tea was done, my neighbour gifted me with a box of sandalwood incense sticks as I took my leave. I have one burning as I write.
To conclude, the sense of smell does have a history — a cultural history (Classen et al. 1994), not just a “natural history” (contrary to Ackerman 1990). To understand its power, we need to liberate its study from the confines of the psychology laboratory and attend to its life in society, as Xuelei Huang does in this book. Be prepared for some heady reading in the pages that follow — as heady as the headiest perfume. You will want to breathe deeply as you read on.
References
Ackerman, Diane (1990). A Natural History of the Senses. Toronto: Penguin Random House Canada
Classen, Constance, David Howes and Anthony Synnott. (1994). Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell. Abingdon, Routledge.
Corbin, Alain (1982). Le miasme et la jonquille; L’odorat et L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne.
Feng, Anran, Wanjun Li, Zhenyu Qian, Jingrui An and Anping Cheng. (2026) Tracing the Scent: A Bibliometric Mapping and Critical Textual Analysis of Historical Evolution and Contemporary Reinterpretation. Cogent Arts and Humanities 13(1)
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2025.2610928
Howes, David. (2025). The Coming Sensorial Revolution in Chinese Studies. Asian Affairs 56(2) 411-414.
Howes, David. (2023). Sensorial Investigations: A History of the Senses in Anthropology, Psychology, and Law. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press,
Huang, Xuelei (2023). Scents of China: A Modern History of Smell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ong, Walter J. (1991) “The Shifting Sensorium.” In David Howes (ed.), The Varieties of Sensory Experience. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Wu, Shengqing and Xuelei Huang, eds. (2023). Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.