Fragrant business

Incense dries on a village road

Doc La is one of the many craft villages in Vietnam where the entire village specialises in a particular product. There are, for example, silk villages, bronze villages, ceramic villages, woodworking villages, conical hat villages, rice-noodle villages and lacquer villages. Doc La’s craft is incense.

 

I went to Doc La on an excursion with Friends of Vietnam Heritage, a not-for-profit educational group of foreign and Vietnamese volunteers n Hanoi who aim to preserve and advance Vietnamese heritage and culture. 

 

I urge anyone visiting or living in Hanoi to get on their mailing list, as their walks, lectures, excusions and film screenings give a wealth of insights into Vietnamese life and culture. Their website is http://fvheritage.org/

 

In Doc La there are signs – and smells – of its main industry everywhere. Racks of incense sticks fill yards and line roads, as do long rows of bunches of incense sticks, fanned out like flowers in a vase. We mostly saw the long sticks of incense seen everywhere in pagodas and temples in Vietnam.

We also saw incense coils drying on racks in one front yard. These are another common sight in pagodas, suspended from the ceiling above worshippers’ heads.

The busiest time of year in in Doc La is the weeks before, during and after the Tet lunar new year celebrations, according to the VnnNews.net website (www.vnnnews.net), which carries an article about the village. At that time many people in this country of almost 90 million make an extra effort to pray to ancestors and other spirits – and that’s a lot of incense.

Incense powder in a bucket and sticks ready for coating

We visited three family businesses. At the first business the incense is applied to the sticks by hand. A woman, squatting on the floor, as do many workers in Vietnam, dipped a handful of sticks in a pot of glue and then in a pile incense powder, then shook off the powder before epeating the process two more times, as a fine mist of incense filled the air. Her only protection from this was a cotton scarf.

At the second workshop the procedure was mechanised but still labour-intensive. A worker fed the wooden sticks one by one into a machine that forced them through a cylinder filled with incense that had the consistency of dough. The sticks shot out the other side, coated and ready for drying.

Coating sticks by machine

In the front room of a third house we visited, the owner carefully printed yellow and red cellophane covers for packs of incense, one colour at a time, on a simple silk-screen printing press.

On the way back to the bus some of us bought packs of incense from one local producer for 8000 dong a pack. I discovered during the journey back to Hanoi that we had paid a heftier “foreigner’s tax” than usual: a Vietnamese friend on the same excursion told me he had helped some of our fellow day-trippers to buy incense for just 2000 dong a pack. Still, even 8000 dong is only 45 cents.