Intoxicating Eastern Perfumes

Perfume appears regularly in poems, in the context of freedom in nature (flowers and so on) or seduction, as Frédéric Obringer tells us. An anthropologist at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the exhibition's scientific adviser, he has translated ancient Chinese recipes on the making and use of incense. Through his remarkable exploratory work, he emphasises the fact that in China "Buddhism helped to make perfumes popular." To document this research, Eric Lefebvre, the museum's director and head of the exhibition committee alongside his opposite number in Shanghai, Li Zhongmou, was keen to show "raw materials, such as sandalwood and agarwood" to shed light on the origin and production of these fragrances. Sometimes from exotic provenances,…