Sacred Mountains, Abandoned Women, and Upright Officials: Facets of the Incense Burner in Early Medieval Chinese Poetry

Boshanlu, or mountain-shaped incense burners, appeared in a fully developed form during the Western Han; later ceramic variations were produced throughout the Six Dynasties. Vessels of this type are generally interpreted as representations of the mythical islands of xian-immortals, while their origins and employment are frequently brought into connection with Han cults of immortality. However, this line of scholarship, to a great extant inherited from the Song antiquarians, largely obscures the multiplicity of meanings the vessel possessed in various contexts of elite life. After surveying archaeological, textual, and visual sources on the boshanlu and outlining multiple contexts in which incense burners were used and their potential functions, the paper focuses on poems on the incense burner composed during the late Han and the Six Dynasties. There the incense burner is connected with the themes of feasting, forsaken women, or with the frustrated ambitions of an honest official—themes that are removed from the religious symbolism scholars have discerned in the material object. The paper examines this discrepancy, and explores the ways metaphoric meanings are engendered in these poems.