Hemp in the Taoist censer

Hemp, má, was an ordinary material for cloth, rope and food in ancient China. Some Daoist and medical texts also describe cannabis in connection with ritual incense, visions and encounters with spirits. These passages document religious and medical ideas; interpreting them as evidence of particular psychoactive practices requires care.

A mountain in bronze

The illustrated Incense Burner (Boshan Lu) is a Western Han bronze dated 200–100 BCE, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Boshanlu (博山爐) censers represented sacred mountains inhabited by immortals. Smoke escaped through openings in the mountain-shaped lid, suggesting clouds around its peaks. Here, tiny figures and fantastic beasts occupy the bronze landscape.

The vessel predates the Shangqing school by centuries. It illustrates an earlier cosmology of sacred mountains and immortal realms, rather than a documented cannabis ceremony. Its original contents are unknown: there is no evidence here that this particular censer contained cannabis.

What the Taoists wrote

Date	Text	Reported association
1st–2nd century CE	Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, an early materia medica	Excessive ingestion of mafen is associated with seeing ghosts and agitated behaviour
Early 6th century	Tao Hongjing, Ben Cao Jing Ji Zhu	Adepts reportedly took mabo with ginseng to gain knowledge of future events
6th century	Wuzangjing, a Daoist medical work	Hemp inflorescences are associated with calling forth apparitions
About 570	Wushang Biyao, a Daoist encyclopaedia	Cannabis is described in ritual incense burners, according to Needham’s reading
About 730	Shiliao bencao, on diet	Cannabis ingestion is linked to seeing spirits
About 1100	Zhenglei bencao	Earlier claims about visions and communication with spirits are repeated

Tao Hongjing (456–536 CE) was a Daoist scholar and pharmacologist who helped compile the Shangqing canon. He recorded the claim about cannabis and ginseng as something adepts said, rather than a demonstrated power. Brand and Zhao’s study of the medical texts translates mabo as cannabis flower. Historical names for plant parts are inconsistent, so calling this preparation simply hemp seeds obscures the textual uncertainty.

The Shangqing tradition centred on revelations and visionary encounters with immortals. Its fourth-century scriptures arose from Yang Xi’s reported visions. Joseph Needham proposed that cannabis helped produce these experiences and that Daoists experimented with psychoactive incense. That is a scholarly hypothesis, distinct from the textual references to cannabis. Neither the existence of incense rituals nor a mountain-shaped censer establishes that participants inhaled intoxicating cannabis smoke.

What the ground adds

Independent archaeological evidence comes from China’s western edge. Wooden braziers from the Jirzankal cemetery in the Pamirs, about 2,500 years old, held burnt cannabis residue indicating material with elevated THC. In the Turpan basin, burials contained cannabis placed beside or over the deceased. These finds support cannabis use in funerary settings, but do not establish a connection to Shangqing rituals or identify the contents of the Cleveland censer.

The law

The pharmacopoeias kept the plant: hemp seed has never been dropped from the official Chinese list of medicines. The modern state classed cannabis as a narcotic in 1985, and use is punished with detention of ten to fifteen days and a fine under the public security law.

Growing hemp for fibre was never prohibited.^{[1][2][3][4][5][6]}