The Last Handmade Joss Stick Maker in Penang

For more than seventy years, Lee Beng Chuan made joss sticks by hand in the heart of George Town, mixing fragrant sandalwood paste, rolling it onto bamboo and leaving the sticks to dry beneath Penang’s unpredictable sun. While factories can produce incense by the thousands, Mr Lee continued at the speed of two hands, a low stool and considerable patience.

I found Lee Beng Chuan early in the morning, squatting on a low stool outside the old George Town shophouse that served as both his workshop and his home. Despite appearing in magazines, newspapers and even a documentary, Mr Lee remained remarkably unassuming. When I arrived, the local celebrity was sitting on a low stool, mixing sandalwood paste in a plastic bucket.

Inside Chinese temples, joss sticks are so familiar that it is easy to notice the smoke before considering the object producing it. The burning incense accompanies prayers and offerings, its fragrance rising through temple halls while ash accumulates below. Demand remains strong. The difficulty is not finding joss sticks, but finding ones still made slowly, individually and by hand.

Mr Lee began by preparing a thick paste from water, sandalwood and a binding powder made from the teja tree. He was particular about the ingredients. “I only use quality sandalwood from Australia, not sawdust used for mass-produced joss sticks,” he told me proudly in broken English. His version cost more to make, but it produced a rich fragrance and burned longer. Even incense, it seems, can object to being rushed and filled with sawdust.

When the mixture reached the correct consistency, he took a handful and rolled it around a long, thin bamboo stick. The movement looked straightforward until I imagined trying it myself. Too little pressure and the paste would not hold; too much and the stick might emerge with more lumps than dignity. Mr Lee’s hands, after seven decades of practice, had no such uncertainty.

The finished sticks were placed on wooden racks outside and left to dry in the sun for several days. Exactly how many depended on the weather, which remained the only member of the workshop unwilling to follow instructions. Once dry, the sticks were rolled beneath a board to smooth their surfaces. From paste to prayer offering, the process required few machines but a great deal of judgement.

Born in Penang to a Chinese family, Mr Lee was eighty-nine when I met him. He had begun making joss sticks in his twenties and had continued for more than seventy years. Remarkably, he had no formal teacher. As a young man, he asked Chinese incense makers for permission to watch them work in factories, then learned through observation, repetition and, presumably, a number of early sticks best forgotten.

He gradually developed a reputation for enormous pillar-shaped joss sticks made for important celebrations. Some were decorated with colourful dragons painted by his wife and used during festivals including the Jade Emperor’s Birthday and the Hungry Ghost Festival. These were not the discreet incense sticks that disappear quietly into a burner. They were ceremonial statements – incense with architectural ambitions.

Age had eventually made the large, elaborate pieces too demanding. Mr Lee concentrated instead on smaller batches for loyal local customers. He also produced sticks decorated with Chinese characters in red and blue, carrying wishes for good fortune, happiness and health. They were popular as gifts: fragrant, meaningful and considerably less likely than flowers to require a vase.

The economics were less uplifting. Machine production could make uniform incense quickly and cheaply, while Mr Lee’s sticks depended on imported sandalwood, manual labour, drying time and Penang sunshine behaving itself. Customers might appreciate craftsmanship, but appreciation does not always volunteer to pay the difference. That familiar calculation has pushed many traditional trades towards disappearance.

“Come here,” Mr Lee said, inviting me into the house. On the walls hung photographs of his mother and father. His father had died when he was still a child. There were also photographs of his wife, who had worked beside him, painting the dragons and helping to make the incense. She had died several years before my visit. In the quiet interior, the craft suddenly felt inseparable from the family life built around it.

His sons had chosen not to continue the business. Handmade joss sticks demanded too much time for too little income, a persuasive argument even against seventy years of family history. His Thai daughter-in-law did make small cone-shaped incense burners, but no one appeared ready to take over Mr Lee’s complete process.

This is why calling him a “living heritage” was more than a flattering phrase. His knowledge did not exist only in recipes or measurements. It lived in the feel of the paste, the pressure of his palms, his judgement of the weather and his ability to recognise when a stick was ready. Such details are difficult to preserve in an archive. A written instruction to “mix until correct” is not especially helpful once the person who knows what correct feels like is gone.

Despite his age, Mr Lee remained agile and intended to continue working for as long as he could. Retirement, apparently, had not been consulted. He settled back onto his low stool, surrounded by bamboo sticks, fragrant paste and the familiar tools of a lifetime.

As I left, the incense drying outside looked modest compared with the giant dragon-covered pillars of his younger years. Yet each stick carried the same accumulated knowledge. Factories could make incense faster and cheaper; what they could not reproduce was seventy years in Mr Lee’s hands. The smoke may vanish within minutes, but the story of how it was made deserves to linger much longer.