"This looks to be of quite fine quality."
At Li Ling's words, the steward's eyes lit up, and he praised him enthusiastically. "Young master, you have an excellent eye. This is Rose Dew, refined by our trading company from sweetbrier grown on the southern offshore islands."
Li Ling smiled faintly. "Rose Dew?"
The steward said, "Out in the countryside, when the weather turns bitterly cold, dew gathers on the petals and the plants freeze over. None retain their fragrance, save these sweetbrier blossoms, sparkling like precious jade and sending forth a fragrance as sweet as heavenly dew.
"The local women collect it to moisten their hair and bodies. Its fragrance lasts for a whole month!"
Mu Qingsi was surprised. "The roses grown where we live lose their fragrance after a day or two at most."
Li Ling smiled at that, but how long the fragrance lasted was not what concerned him.
This was indeed Rose Dew. Its raw material was sweetbrier, also known as tumi, a variety of rose.
Li's Incense Workshop also knew how to make something akin to floral essential oil: using a platinum vessel to collect rose vapor and condense it into water, then gathering and steaming it repeatedly until the fragrance accumulated.
Perfume in traditional incense culture could be traced back as far as the Warring States period, when people bathed with fragrant herbs such as orchids and hui, a practice called "bathing in orchid broth." During the Five Dynasties period, foreign states presented Rose Dew as tribute to the Central Plains. By the Song dynasty, distillation techniques from Arabia had reached Guangzhou, where locals imitated Rose Dew using tuberose and jasmine instead. Broadly speaking, the methods included distillation, pressing, cold infusion, and solvent extraction.
This reflected the development of distillation techniques and extraction processes. Without