Mosquito Coils

When the Foochow pioneers first arrived in Sibu, they had to get used to the millions of mosquitoes.

They used wood fire to smoke out the mosquitoes, cut down all the grass growing around their coolie houses.

and of course they wore long sleeves and long trousers.

So who invented the mosquito coil? The Foochows called it Mosquito Incense. I don't think my maternal grandfather would be happy to know that the mosquito coil was invented by a Japanese.




In our Nang Chong house, every evening my grandmother would light a mosquito coil and placed it at the door to our bed room and that would signal the time for us to get into bed to sleep.

the smell of the mosquito coil burning actually lulled us to sleep.

Once we were asleep, we did not get bothered by mosquitoes. But my grandmother was sensitive and she would get up and start killing the bothersome mosquitoes. Once she smashed one, she would say,"I wonder whose blood that is....."

The next morning she would report to all of us how many mosquitoes she killed. That was fun.


Pyrethrum was used for centuries as an insecticide in Persia and Europe,^[3] being developed into a mosquito coil in the late 1800s by a Japanese business man, Eiichiro Ueyama (ja:上山英一郎). At that time in Japan, pyrethrum powder was mixed with sawdust and burned to repel mosquitoes. Ueyama initially created incense sticks mixed from starch powder, dried mandarin orange skin powder, and pyrethrum powder, burning in around 40 minutes. In 1895, his wife Yuki proposed making the sticks thicker and longer, and curling them in spirals, in order to make them last longer. In 1902, after a series of trials and errors, he achieved an incense burning effect with a spiral shape. The method included cutting thick incense bars to a set length and manually winding them into a spiral. This method was used until 1957, when mass production was made possible through machine punching.^[4][5] After the Second World War, his company, Dainihon Jochugiku Co. Ltd, established joint-venture firms in various countries, including China and Thailand, to produce mosquito repelling products based on local conditions. (Wikipedia)