Liquidámbar — the Nahua xochiocotzotl that New Spain exported as a perfume and medicine
Hernández's remedies, printed by Ximénez in Mexico in 1615, describe a great tree the Nahua call xochiocotzotl whose incised bark yields the liquor Spaniards named liquidámbar yndiana, and record it packed with tobacco in the smoking canes of the Indies. Acosta in 1590 rates it an esteemed medicinal perfume-resin and says New Spain surpasses all provinces in these gums. Each claim is bound to the page that carries it, with the indigenous origin and the modern identity kept honest.
Why this wins its question: English-language writing on storax collapses two trees — the Levant Liquidambar orientalis and the American L. styraciflua — into a single incense note and skips the Mexican record entirely. This object opens instead with the actual page: Hernández's 1615 chapter naming the tree in Nahuatl as xochiocotzotl before it names it in Spanish, the same volume's tobacco canes packed with the resin, and Acosta's 1590 judgement that New Spain led all provinces in these perfume-medicine gums — each bound to the leaf that carries it, with the indigenous origin foregrounded and the modern binomial flagged as modern consensus rather than smuggled into the sources.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The earliest systematic record is a chapter of indigenous botany. Francisco Hernández's remedies, printed at Mexico in 1615 in Juan Ximénez's Quatro libros de la naturaleza, open Libro Primero, chapter XVIII, page 18: "DEL ARBOL DE LIQUIDAMbar, que los naturales llaman xochiocotzotl, quauhxihuitl." The text describes "vn arbol grãde que tiene las ojas casi como las del Larice, divididas en tres puntas, y en dos senos, por la vna parte blãcas, y por la otra algo escuras, y aserradas, la corteza del tronco en parte roja, y en parte verde", growing "en campos llanos, y en tierras calientes … como lo es en Guayacocotla, Guachinango, y Xicotepec", of hot and dry nature and very agreeable smell. The tree is named first in Nahuatl and described from the American landscape.
The same chapter says plainly whose name the resin carries and whose the tree is. "Saxada la corteza deste arbol sale vn licor que los Españoles llaman lyquidambar yndiana, y los Mexicanos yndios xochiocotzotl" — incise the bark and out comes a liquor the Spaniards call Indian liquidámbar and the Mexican Indians call xochiocotzotl. The Spanish word for the export is a borrowing onto a plant the source assigns to the Nahua by name; the contribution recorded here is a Spanish naturalist writing down, under its own indigenous name, a materia medica that was already Mexican.
The resin sat inside an indigenous way of smoking. The same 1615 volume, chapter LXXIX, "DE LOS TAVACOS QUE vsan en la ysla Española, que los Mexicanos llaman picietl", describes the canes: "ciertos pedaços huecos de caña, de palmo y medio de largo, que por defuera estan vntados con polvo de carbon, y por de dentro llenos de tavaco, liquidombar, (ò xochi ocotzotl). Y tambien de algunas otras cosas calidas, y odoriferas", lit at the packed end so the smoke drawn through the other "quita suavemente el sentido, y todo trabajo, y cansancio". Liquidámbar is one of the aromatic things burned with the tobacco, and the passage — for which the dedicated object is tabaco-picietl-de-las-indias — is cited here only for the resin's presence in the tube.
A second, independent naturalist places it in the export economy of New Spain. José de Acosta's Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Seville 1590, Libro Quarto, chapter 29 — "Del Liquedambar, y otros Azeytes, y Gomas, y Drogas, que se traen de Indias", page 265 — writes: "DESPVES del Balsamo tiene estima el Liquedambar: es otro licor tambien oloroso y medicinal, mas espesso en si, y que se viene a quajar, y hazer pasta … de buen perfume, y que le aplican a heridas, y otras necessidades." He adds that "Viene tambien el Liquedambar de la nueva España, y es sin duda aventajada aquella provincia en estas Gomas, o licores, o xugos de arboles, y assi tienen copia de diversas materias para perfumes, y para medicinas", naming ánime, copal and suchicopal alongside it. In 1590 the resin is already an esteemed drug and perfume shipped from the Indies, and New Spain its pre-eminent source.
The tree the sources describe is today identified as the American sweetgum, Liquidambar styraciflua L. A 2023 study read in PubMed Central gives that binomial and the family Altingiaceae, describes it as an aromatic hardwood of 20–25 m, and places it native to the south and south-east of the United States extending into Central America and Mexico, with antitumor, antioxidant, hepatoprotective and antimicrobial activity recorded for the species in earlier work. Hernández's Guayacocotla-to-Xicotepec range in northern Veracruz falls inside that native distribution. The equation of xochiocotzotl with L. styraciflua is modern botanical consensus rather than a statement of the 1615 or 1590 texts, which is why this claim sits at 0.8 and rests its identity on the modern paper, not on the imprints.
What this entry does not establish, said so nobody reads more into it. Nothing opened here dates the resin's arrival in European pharmacy or perfumery, names a ship, a port or a year, or distinguishes at the point of sale the American liquidámbar of these pages from the Levant storax of Liquidambar orientalis with which European druggists confused it; the commercial and pharmaceutical history that would join Hernández's Veracruz stands to a European apothecary's jar sits on hosts that do not answer from this container. The imprints are evidence that Spanish natural history recorded and named this Mexican resin, in Nahuatl, within a lifetime of the conquest, and shipped it as a drug and a perfume; they are not evidence of a European transfer this object has not sourced.