Boundless China: Incense Consumption and the Fate of Hawaiian Environmental Sovereignty, 1811–30

Chinese have been consumers of exotic smells and tastes for millennia. From the overland trade of the Silk Road to the overseas trade centered at Canton, Chinese consumerism has long had consequential effects on the industrial, agricultural, and environmental landscapes of regions within and beyond Asia. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, foreign trading companies (mostly American) began an experiment in marketing Pacific Island goods – including Hawaiian sandalwood, the subject of this paper – to the Hong merchants in Canton. The Chinese had long consumed sandalwood, carving it into decorative boxes and furniture pieces, but more frequently the imported wood was made into joss sticks (incense) to be burnt in temples and at family household altars. Unbeknownst to these Chinese incense consumers, however, were the profound consequences that their consumption patterns had on Oceanian peoples and their environments. In Hawaiʻi, the sandalwood harvest brought about major transformations in the political, social, and environmental orders. The sandalwood trade provided the Hawaiian royalty with the opportunity to amass great quantities of wealth in exchange for their islands' indigenous sandalwood. To achieve this new prosperity, the king created a monopoly on sandalwood and taxed the commoners to harvest the wood for the government. When the trees finally ran out, Hawaiʻi lost the one resource that both the Americans and the Chinese wanted. Left with insurmountable debts to the American traders, Hawaiʻi was thus forced to increasingly sacrifice its political and environmental sovereignty to the Americans. To understand why Hawaiʻi went down this path, it is important to place the narratives of Chinese religious consumption and Hawaiian environmental history side-by-side. This paper will highlight how Chinese consumer preferences and global trade networks were the instigators of both profound environmental change as well as the loss of indigenous environmental sovereignty in Hawaiʻi.