The DOCUMENTS File

DOCUMENTS, file number one. Two amber bottles resting on a piece of driftwood.

Exhibit A, the name. Two large Chinese characters, wen and xian, with handwritten notes: to smell, to offer. A Feather bottle taped below.

Meng Zhaoran started DOCUMENTS in Shanghai in 2021. The English name came first. In this idea a perfume is a record you leave behind, a way to be smelled and then remembered.

The Chinese name, wén xiàn, puts two words together. Wén is to smell, and in older writing to hear. Xiàn is to offer, as at an altar.

Exhibit B, Season 7. Four photographs taped to red paper: agarwood, sandalwood, ambergris and musk.

The four great aromatics. An incense coil burning on red, and a Season 7 box.

Season 7 goes back to the four great aromatics of Chinese incense: agarwood, sandalwood, ambergris and musk.

Each scent was made first as an incense coil and then as a parfum. Every set holds a 30 ml parfum and its matching coil, so you can smell the same idea through smoke and through skin.

Exhibit C, the bottle. A green First Fruit bottle on graph paper with construction lines: cap a triangle, body a round glass column.

Chinese carpenters join wood without nails. One piece is cut to slot into the next, a mortise and a tenon. The bottle takes that joint as its shape. Turn the cap over and it holds the bottle up.

Bold zen. An amber bottle leaning on driftwood, on black paper.

Zen is quiet. Bold is loud. DOCUMENTS puts the two together. In the founder's view, Chan, the Chinese school of Zen, holds the place in China that luxury holds in the West.

So the bottles are plain and heavy, in ink black and bamboo yellow, and nothing is there only for decoration.

Exhibit D, the rooms. A ledger of four stores: Night Temple, Secret Cellar, Bamboo Hall and Long Temple.

DOCUMENTS designs its own stores and gives each one a name. Night Temple opened first, on Huaihai Road in 2021. Long Temple, at the West Bund, has a floor of recycled ceramic.

Each is a room to smell in slowly.