Mangla: Connecting Memories of the Tibetan Plateau to Everyday Life Through Fragrance and Craft

Stillness is not somewhere far away.

多哇德吉, founder of Mangla

Lying on the grass, smelling flowers while watching the clouds. Cattle and sheep in the distance, with the wind passing over fields of qingke, the barley cultivated on the plateau. Such scenes belong to the childhood remembered by Mangla’s founder, 多哇德吉.

Even after she had lived in cities for a long time, her thoughts turned toward those grasslands. A place to be close to nature and return to herself within. Mangla connects that memory to fragrances used in life today.

Applying perfume to the skin. Burning incense in a room. Smoothing cream over the hands. Mangla extends fragrances born from the plants and life of the Tibetan Plateau to both the body and the home.

Key Information
The Founder and the Brand’s Origins
What Defines the Brand
References

Key Information

Brand name: Mangla / Chinese name: 缦拉
Founded: 2023
Founder: 多哇德吉
Founder’s hometown: the grasslands of Golok, Qinghai Province, China
Official website: MANGLA

Mangla bears a name transliterated from Tibetan that means “the path of healing.” With “spiritual stillness,” “peaceful energy,” and “a deep connection with nature” as its central ideas, the brand seeks to bring time for looking inward into everyday life through fragrance.

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

Childhood on the Golok Grasslands and a Longing for Nature in City Life

多哇德吉 was born and raised on the grasslands of Golok. Colorful wildflowers, blue sky, clouds, cattle, and sheep. As a child, she spent time lying on the grassland, taking in its smells and watching fields of qingke sway in the wind. Nature was both her playground and the environment surrounding daily life.

Once, while looking up at the sky from a thick layer of wild grass, she felt as though the powerful, quiet force of nature were lifting her body into the air. Was it a dream or imagination? She asks herself that question, too, while saying that the experience left her with joy in and awe of nature.

After growing up and spending years living in cities, she began to look back on her childhood and wish to return to that place where she could draw close to nature. At Mangla’s starting point, the scenery of her hometown overlaps with that feeling nurtured during urban life.

I hope Mangla can create a natural connection between people and the land of Tibet.

多哇德吉

Her memories of home also include a life of burning incense. In the morning in pastoral areas, smoke from burning Tibetan cypress rises over the vast grasslands. People offer prayers, looking out over snowy mountains, lakes, and meadows. There, fragrance is connected with nature and prayer. Mangla translates those local scents and culture into products for contemporary life.

A Shanghai Presentation with Fragrance Oils, Incense, and Body Care

Founded in 2023, Mangla held a fragrance experience exhibition and presentation in Shanghai on October 16, 2025. Products introduced there included fragrance oils, incense sticks, candles, diffusers, hand creams, and soaps. It was developing both things that touch the skin and things that spread scent through a room.

Old wooden architectural fittings and unworked stones were used at the venue. It was a place for conveying the land and life of the Tibetan Plateau through scent and space. In addition to the fragrances themselves, Mangla incorporated the plateau’s culture into the places and vessels in which they are used.

Traditional Craft and Living Spaces Presented at Design Shanghai

From March 19 to 22, 2026, Mangla exhibited at Design Shanghai. Alongside perfumes, incense sticks, and body-care products were wooden furniture, wool cushions, and woven wall hangings.

多哇德吉 describes this approach to making things as follows.

We do not want simply to take elements of Tibetan culture and bring them over unchanged.

多哇德吉

Her aim is to unpack traditional structures and designs and reassemble them as contemporary products. A tea table drew inspiration from the eaves of Tibetan homes and was finished by craftspeople polishing the wood. Wool cushions incorporated folk patterns, and the woven textiles depicted the brand’s snow-leopard motif.

Fragrance products were also placed in the areas surrounded by furniture. Perfumes and incense vessels occupied spaces in which people sit, rest, and welcome others each day. The dialogue between tradition and modernity that 多哇德吉 describes appears in these specific objects and their combinations.

Mangla’s perfumes later appeared at ScentFest in San Francisco as well. Painter and perfume maker John Biebel encountered its works with woody, herbal, and floral scents and sensed an approachable quality of handcraft.

On October 16, 2026, the brand launched in Japan through U NOSE SHOP and NOSE SHOP online. Its initial Japanese offering consisted of five perfumes and hand creams in two of those fragrances.

What Defines the Brand

Five Fragrances Connected with Life on the Plateau

Mangla layers its five fragrances with images of the plateau’s animals and plants: a snow leopard, an eagle, a white yak, a Tibetan antelope, and flowering grasslands. Each carries themes such as stillness or warmth, connected with the scents of trees, flowers, and resins.

The Purest of Snow, given the Japanese subtitle “Quiet Snow Country,” is a creation with a snow-leopard motif. Taking the coolness of cypress that suggests snowy highlands as its subject, it combines bergamot, lavender, and oud. Oud is the name for a scent derived from agarwood.

Eye of the Vault, given the Japanese subtitle “Eye of the Azure Sky,” is layered with the image of an eagle. At its center is sandalwood, combined with cardamom and coconut. While working with the same woody family, it chooses a combination different from the citrus and herbs of “Quiet Snow Country.”

The five fragrances embody different aspects of the plateau. Mangla does not limit them to perfumes, extending them to hand creams and other products and broadening the same themes into scents for the body and for spaces.

A Materials Policy Favoring Cultivated Trees and Artisan-Made Incense Vessels

Mangla sets out a policy of choosing cultivated sandalwood, agarwood, and Tibetan cypress without felling wild trees. While obtaining fragrance from trees, it also considers how those trees are grown and sourced.

Vacuum extraction technology is used to extract the fragrance materials.

Local craft also plays a role in making the vessels. Red-copper incense vessels are finished by hand by craftspeople from the plateau. Meanwhile, diffuser bottles and fragrance-oil caps incorporate forms inspired by Tibetan prayer wheels. A prayer wheel is a Buddhist implement containing scriptural texts that is turned during prayer. The approach of reassembling traditional forms into contemporary tools also extends to the vessels containing fragrance.

Mangla also sets out a policy of returning part of its proceeds to improvements in pastoral areas of the Tibetan Plateau and support for children’s education.

Extending Fragrance Use to Incense and Body Care

Mangla’s incense sticks are 12 centimeters long. The brand considers the period from lighting a stick until it burns out as one continuous span of time. Fragrance spreads into the space with the smoke and eventually disappears. The product offers a way to attend slowly to that transition.

Incense sticks are not only a traditional craft but also an expression connecting nature, culture, and contemporary life.

MANGLA

The hand creams take as their subject hands that work on the plateau, make things, and touch people and nature. Hands receive the warmth of butter tea, weave textiles, and are exposed to wind, snow, and sunlight. Mangla connects these daily activities with the act of caring for the hands, developing its five fragrances into creams.

Incense accompanies time spent in a room, while cream accompanies a life lived through the hands. A person living in a city uses perfume or incense and, for a moment, turns their attention to their breathing and the nature around them. The connection with nature that 多哇德吉 sought in her homeland takes shape in these small everyday actions.