Gu's Incense (谷氏香业)

Gu Junming is the thirteenth-generation heir to a family incense-making craft rooted in Guzhuang Village, Anci District, Langfang — a lineage his family and Beijing Daily's own reporting trace back roughly 600 years to the Yuan-Ming dynastic transition, when an ancestral migration from Shanxi is said to have carried the trade into Hebei. Gu began learning the craft at age six in the family workshop and now holds status as a Hebei Province-level representative transmitter of intangible cultural heritage for traditional incense-making technique, a provincial-level, not national-level, government designation, alongside a separately and privately conferred master-craftsman industry title. His business, registered as Hebei Gu's Incense Industry Co., Ltd., makes line incense, five-element wellness blends, and sandalwood incense through a traditional multi-step process — material selection, powder grinding, mixing to ancestral formulas, pressing, shaping, and drying — and in 2019 was designated a Yanzhao Old Brand, Hebei's regional heritage-business honor. In September 2023 the company signed a partnership with Beijing's Palace Museum Culture Propagation Co. to co-develop Forbidden City-themed handcrafted incense products. Commercially, Gu runs an active Douyin storefront and livestream operation begun in 2019 — 120,000 followers, 347,000 likes across 380 videos, and cumulative sales past 20,000 units nationwide, with single livestream sessions reported earning more than 80,000 yuan — alongside an e-commerce incubation base built to train other regional heritage craftspeople in online sales.