Chai Lee

Three generations of women ran the Chai family timber business, and this is one of them.

A timber yard in summer smells like the rest of it: sap running, peel drying on a bench, everything faintly sticky. White pine resin sits at the centre.

Around it, green things — privet leaf, lychee leaf, bitter orange leaf oil — and citrus with the rind still on, kumquat and green orange cut fresh enough to sting. Pandanus and linden flower stop it turning harsh without making it soft. Anise slips in and sharpens everything again. Hemp seed reads more like grain than flower.

Damfool writes before he blends. Each release starts as a person — a place, an era, a life with something unresolved in it — and the formula follows the character rather than the other way round. Lord of Tree is drawn from an Ah Cheng novel. Most of the rest are his own.

Nothing in the line shares a signature, and none of them is the lead. The recurring figures are altar keepers, aunties, and people coming home after too long away, closer to the characters met at the edge of a world than to anyone at its centre. The seasons make it literal: Cantonese memory in the first, Fujian in the second, a Macau port town in the third, three generations of one timber family in the fourth.

Behind all of it is one Macanese perfumer at one bench in Chengdu. He builds his own components and tinctures instead of buying them ready-made, and works with materials that are hard to get or specific to one place — aged nutmeg paste from a Penang spice factory running for over a century, Tibetan yak extract that took a year to render.