Shi Jin Yu Muxiang Zhai

Shi Jin Yu Muxiang Zhai — formerly known as Shi Jin Yu Sanfang — has made incense beside Lukang's Mazu (Tianhou) temple since 1756, during the Qianlong era of the Qing dynasty, making it one of Taiwan's oldest continuously run incense houses. The business is now transitioning to its eighth generation, with Shih Yeh-chih working alongside his father, seventh-generation proprietor Shih Chi-hsun, to keep the shop running.

Its incense — standing sticks, coils, offering incense, incense towers, and powdered incense among the range — is made by hand from agarwood, sandalwood, and traditional Chinese herbal ingredients, without synthetic dyes, and the shop holds SGS quality certification for its products. That combination of hand production and multi-generation family ownership situates it within Lukang's wider cluster of historic incense makers, a town whose incense trade dates to Fujianese immigrant craftsmen of the same period.

Now run under its updated name, the shop continues to balance the eighth generation's interest in newer product formats against the handmade methods its Qianlong-era founders established, a tension the current owners describe openly as inheritance meeting innovation.