It starts as a faint whiff of horse sweat and stables. On Spring nights when I walk home from the subway through our compound in Shanghai, I can map where I am in relation to the jasmine vines surging over the rockeries. Under lantern light, these boulders look as though they are capped with snow. From twenty feet away, the scent is seductive – a mix of barely-ripe banana, paperwhites, and pony muzzle. Ten feet away, it’s intoxicating. Especially if it rained earlier in the day and the night is warm and damp. But at two feet, the fragrance becomes menacing, and as the season wears on, repulsive as a squat toilet.
Favored as a perfume ingredient for centuries in India and China, jasmine, like any flower, is a cocktail of compounds. The main ones that lend jasmine its distinctive, heady aroma are floral benzyl acetate, spicy eugenol, grassy phytol, and citrusy linalool, found in most natural floral scents. These are the chemicals that make jasmine smell breezy and green. The other is indole. At low concentration, indole smells softly floral. It’s a volatile prominent in many white flowers like gardenia and magnolia. But the closer I get, the scent turns dense, overripe, and cloying. I sniff something funky and rotten. Bizarrely, on a warm evening after the rain has cleansed the air, I smell decay, sweat, sex, and feces. I smell the indole paradox. In dilution, divine; in concentration, rank. A small molecule of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, indole is present in flowers but also in decomposing shrimp, sewage, groin sweat, and the breath of aroused lovers.
In varying concentrations, indole is produced by most living things. It reminds me that scent is promiscuous. We share our molecules. Context is everything, and the different climates of indole on my skin, or in a rose, or overcooked cabbage, or squat toilet trigger different impressions in my brain. Indole reminds me that scent is alive. It is volatile – a creature that flies – changing according to time and place, and it’s always transforming. The smell of jasmine on a cold day in the shade is nothing like its smell on a humid afternoon. This is the nature of our chemical world. Substances evaporate. Aromas rise, dissipate, and disappear. Smell exists in four dimensions. As I walk through my compound at night, entranced by the scent and cool glow of jasmine, I can almost believe that all this is happening just for me, that the fragrance and color exist for my pleasure, just as the steppingstones and rockeries and garden pavilions have been built to entertain everyone who lives here in this middle-class enclave in Shanghai.
Jasmine under moonlight is an image conjured by Chinese poets for centuries. If I ignore my compound’s apartment towers, and the SUVs gliding into the underground parking garages, I can imagine the Tang Dynasty poet Han Yu, wandering into a mountain temple at twilight and enjoying the jasmine:
I climbed to the hall, sat down on rain-washed steps
among great plantain leaves, swollen jasmine buds.
He noticed the bats, just as I do now. I feel grateful to them for eating the mosquitos that plague us all summer, but also for pollinating the flowers that gleam in the moonlight. And I remember that, of course, flowers aren’t blooming just for us. They aren’t ornaments. We can enlist them as metaphors for purity, but flowers – the sex organs of plants – are essentially carnal. Sweet night-blooming jasmine is busy seducing pollinator moths, just as in daytime, the roses and camellia are soliciting bees. I’m walking through an orgy. It’s not such a paradox that indole smells both floral and of the sweaty business of sex. Flowers are fecund and generate life. From their appearance about 200 million years ago, flowering plants conquered the earth. Through the sweet rewards of pollen and honey, they nudged evolution, releasing aroma from petals, stems, seeds, nectar, and leaves for pollinators and predators. They smelled for bats, butterflies, beetles, and moths for millions of years before they fed our human bodies and agile minds.
This is the indole paradox. I am a coda to the main act. This fragrance, sweet and foul, is not for me. And yet, I owe it everything.
—About the Author—
Fiona Lindsay Shen is the author of two books exploring the cultural histories of natural phenomena: Pearl: Nature’s Perfect Gem (Reaktion Books, 2022) and Silver: Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books, 2017). These have appeared in Japanese and Mandarin translations. She is also the biographer of an early female translator of classical Chinese poetry: Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai (Hong Kong University Press, 2012). In keeping with her sensory research, she has a current contract with Reaktion Books for Lotus: A Sensorium. An art historian who grew up in Scotland and raised her own family in Shanghai, she has lived and worked in Britain, China, and the United States. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Chapman University, California. She has written for Orion magazine, the Washington Post, China Today, and the Los Angeles Review of Books
*read more jasmine HERE!
Thank you for this, very beautiful writing linking botany, chemistry and poetry.