Camphor

Light a camphor tablet and it burns with a tall clean flame and goes out having left no ash, no soot and no residue on the plate. That property, and not the smell, is why camphor is at the centre of Hindu worship.

The arati is the waving of a flame before an image at the close of a puja, and the flame is a camphor flame. The reading given for it in the tradition is direct: camphor is a substance that becomes light entirely, keeping nothing back, and the worshipper is asked to do the same. The self burns off in the presence of the divine and there is no remainder. Devotional literature uses the image constantly, and it is one of the few ritual substances whose meaning is a straightforward consequence of its chemistry.

Camphor is also passed around after the arati so that worshippers may cup their hands over the flame and touch them to their eyes and head, taking the light as a blessing.

Beyond the temple it is a major drug. Chinese and Southeast Asian medicine use it as a warming and dispersing agent, it was central to embalming across a wide area, and its industrial history includes celluloid and smokeless powder, both of which consumed it in enormous quantities before synthesis caught up. Most camphor now sold is made from turpentine, and the ritual tablet is usually synthetic.

Two different substances have been sold as camphor and the older one was the more valuable. Borneol, from Dryobalanops trees in Borneo and Sumatra, was traded to China and to the Arab world from at least the sixth century and was worth many times its weight in silver. Arab and Chinese sources both describe it as the finest kind, and it entered the ketoret-adjacent trade in aromatics that ran across the Indian Ocean.

The commoner sort, from Cinnamomum camphora, is what most later trade meant. Taiwan held the largest stands, and the camphor monopoly was a significant part of why the island mattered to the Qing and then, after 1895, to Japan. Camphor was strategic because celluloid film and smokeless propellant both needed it, and until synthesis matured in the 1930s there was no substitute at scale. The extraction was carried out largely by forced and coerced labour among the mountain peoples, and the industry is a straightforward case of a ritual substance becoming a colonial commodity.

Both kinds ended up in the same religious contexts, which is why textual references are hard to resolve. A Sanskrit or Arabic mention of camphor may mean Borneo camphor, and the distinction changes the trade route, the price and the plausibility of the account.

The tree camphor is now a widely planted street tree and an invasive weed in Australia and the American South.