Phia Thap Incense Village

Two hands settle on a handful of damp dough and begin to roll.

That is the first movement anyone sees on stepping into a yard in Phia Thắp. A Nùng An woman sits on a low stool. In front of her is a basin of brown dough, and beside her lies a bundle of thin bamboo sticks, already split. She takes one stick, dips it in water and rolls it through the dough. Then she sets it between her palms and twists. The stick spins. The dough clings to it and slowly thickens, perfectly even from one end to the other.

The whole movement takes a few seconds. She does it again and again, one stick after another.

Phia Thắp is a hamlet of the Nùng An people. The Nùng An are one of the groups of the Nùng, a people of northern Vietnam. The hamlet belongs to Quảng Uyên commune, in Cao Bằng province. From the center of Cao Bằng province, it lies about 26 kilometers along National Route 3. In books and on road signs, the name appears in two spellings, Phia Thắp and Phja Thắp. It is the same place and the same craft. They are simply two ways of writing one sound that standard Vietnamese has no ready letter for.

No one in the village can say exactly what year incense making began here. The elders say only that it has passed down through many generations, that their grandparents made it, and the generation before them too. People still say the craft village is more than a hundred years old. The starting point is blurry, but the method is crystal clear, because it was handed down by hand and not in writing.

Follow those hands back to where a stick of incense begins.

It begins in the forest. The sticks are split from mai, a kind of bamboo from the mountain forests of Cao Bằng. The stalk must be neither too young nor too old. Then it is split so fine that each piece is as slender as a whittled chopstick. The dough that coats the outside is mixed from sawdust and the bark of the cotton tree.

But the deciding ingredient is a leaf.

The Nùng An people of Phia Thắp use bầu hắt, a kind of forest leaf, to bind the dough. The leaves are gathered, prepared, and then mixed in. The sap in the leaf holds the dough tight to the stick without a single drop of chemicals. And because it is a forest leaf, it carries the smell of the forest. It is a very light herbal smell, a little sharp and a little sweet, drifting up while the dough is still wet. Anyone who has been to the village remembers that smell. The incense keeps it until the moment it is lit, in some place very far away.

The base of each stick is dyed red with chăm che leaves, also picked nearby. The color comes up bright, nothing like an industrial dye.

The main ingredients all come from the plants of the hills and forests. There is the mai bamboo and the cotton tree bark. There are the leaves of bầu hắt and chăm che.

As for preparing the dough, each household keeps its own secret.

The full process runs through many steps. The sticks are split and the dough is prepared. Then come the dipping, the rolling and twisting until each stick is round and even, the drying, and last of all the dyeing of the bases. The hardest step is the one that looks easiest, the rolling. Visitors are often invited to try, and almost everyone fails on the first stick. It comes out thick in places and thin in others, the dough falls away in flakes, and the stick bends. The hands must be steady. The pressure must be just right. The dough must be neither too dry nor too damp. That evenness of hand takes many years to earn, and it fits inside the few seconds that the artisan makes look effortless.

Then comes the part that makes the whole village hard to forget.

Finished incense goes out to dry. It is not laid in straight rows but fanned out, each bundle spread into a large circle with the red bases facing outward. Dozens of these circles stand all over the yards, along the fences, beside the paths and on drying racks in the sun. Seen from the edge of the village, the whole hamlet looks as if a crop of giant red flowers has just bloomed, blazing red against gray stone and green mountains. The stronger the sun, the harsher the color, and the more the herbal smell rises.

This is not a craft that only a handful of houses still keep up. Of the 51 households in the village, 48 take part in making incense. The work gives jobs to more than 100 people. That means almost the whole hamlet, with someone in nearly every house sitting and rolling incense. That smell comes not from some small workshop but from a whole community living by its own craft.

Phia Thắp lies within the Non nước Cao Bằng UNESCO Global Geopark, and the incense village is recognized as part of the cultural value of that heritage area. That means the stone, the mountains and the caves of this plateau are listed together with the red circles of incense drying in the yards. Side by side, they make up the worth of this land.

Some households have opened their homes to guests for the night. Guests stay over, and their hosts guide them as they sit and roll incense together. That may be the fullest way to understand Phia Thắp.

In many craft villages, visitors only stand outside and watch. Phia Thắp is different. Here they can smell, touch, sit down to try, and ruin the very first stick.

And on the way home, already in the car and some distance down the road, a hand raised to the face still carries the scent of bầu hắt leaves on the fingertips. That smell stays longer than any photograph.