Gaharu also known as agarwood, aloeswood or eaglewood is the resinous, fragrant and highly valuable heartwood produced by the Aquilaria tree which has been widely used by the aromatic industry.
When the trees were infected with mold, it begins to produce an aromatic resin in response to this attack. As the infection grows, it results in a very rich, dark resin within the heartwood. The resin is commonly called gaharu, jinko, aloeswood, agarwood, pokok karas or oud and is valued in many cultures for its distinctive fragrance, and thus is used for incense and perfumes.
Aquilaria spp. tree is an evergreen angiosperm of the family Thymelaeaceae (Ng. et al., 1997). The mature tree could grow up to 40 meter high and 60 centimeter in diameter with moderately straight stem. It bears white flowers that are sweetly scented. A total of about fifteen (15) species of Aquilaria have been reported and have significant commercial value. These species include Aquilaria malaccensis, A. agallocha, A. baillonii, A. crassna, A. hirta, A. rostrata, A. beccariana, A. cummingiana, A. falaria, A. khasiana, A. microcarpa,, A. grandiflora, A. chinensis or A. sinensis. A. boneensis, and A. bancana.
Aquilaria species, generally, have smooth, thin, pale, gray bark with dense, dark foliage of shiny elliptical to oblong leaves with average leaves size of 7.5 – 12 cm long and 2.5-5.5 cm wide (Ding Hou, 1960). A shade-tolerant tree, Aquilaria is an understory tree of mature evergreen and semi-evergreen forest occurring at low to medium altitudes, generally up to 1000 m above sea level depending on the type of species. All these Aquilaria species are significantly important for gaharu industries.
In the market, gaharu is the trade name generally refers to “fragrant wood” or “scented wood” or “aromatic resinous wood” source from Aquilaria spp. timber tree. This fragrant wood has several other common names, such as “agarwood, eaglewood or aloeswood” (English), “agor” (Bangladesh), “akyaw” (Myanmar), “calambour” (French), “adlerholz” (Germany), “kalambak, calambac or tengkaras” (Kalimantan, Sabah and Sarawak), “kikaras” (Sundanese), “alim, halim or karek” (Sumatra), “agaru or sasi” (India), “kanankoh” (Vietnam) and “Ch’Ing Kui Hsiang, Ch’En Hsiang, Chan Hsiang, Chi Ku Hsiang or Huang Shu Hsiang (China).
Gaharu served as raw material for the production of many aromatic medicinal products, such stimulant, tonic and carminative medicine. The essential oil extracted from the wood served as constituent of medicines for palpitation of the heart and other ills (Burkill, 1966). For an example, in Japan, the “scented wood” has also long been used as incenses for stomachache remedy and sedatives of the Oriental medicine as well as used to anoint the dead (Okugawa et al., 1993). In India, the essential oil extracted from the “scented wood” has been used in the production of perfume and other new products such as gaharu essence, soap and shampoo (Chakrabarty et al., 1994). In Malaysia, Gaharu continue to be highly demanded by the cosmetic and manufacturing industries..
For more than 200 years, Gaharu has been traded across Europe and Asia. The main consumers are from the Middle East and China (Burkill 1935). In the Middle East, particularly the Arab, gaharu are largely used as incense in religious ceremonies or spiritual rituals.
Currently the demand for gaharu is high and large quantities are traded in domestic and international market. Internationally, gaharu are widely traded to the Middle East, China, Taiwan and Japan in the form of solid wood to be used as incense for traditional and religious ceremonies, medicinal purposes, and in distilled pure resin form for perfume and perfume component. The traded price ranges from low to extremely high depending on the values and qualities of the gaharu produced.
Annual Gaharu exports from Malaysia amounted to RM72mil a year. In Peninsular Malaysia, approximately 0.5 million kg of gaharu was exported from 1998 to 2003 which contributed an estimated amount of RM36 million to the national economy.
Agarwood trees are able to be harvested after 7 years of planting. Inoculation process can be applied when the tree is 5 years old and it can produced excellent Agarwood continuously over the 2 years.
Gaharu can be produced through conventional and non-conventional methods. Conventionally, gaharu is produced by wounding the Aquilaria tree involving slashing with parang or knife in order for the trees to be infected and begin to produce aromatic resin. On the contrary, non-conventional method for the production of large volume of quality gaharu from Aquilaria tree is also available and continuously explored.
Currently China is the biggest consumers of gaharu with an import of 500 tons per year. The biggest consumers of agarwood products are Middle East, Taiwan and Japan whereas the biggest exporter of gaharu is Indonesia.
The Chinese tuhao, the nouveau riche, have been making headlines in China and abroad this year. Reports of tuhao and tuhao dama (rich greedy middle-aged women) crowding out luxury shops and fighting for gold ornaments in China and in cities around the world have become commonplace.
But there is another wave of Chinese who could buy LV, Prada or Hermès, gold and rare stones but look for something else. They want rare things that few others can own. These are the new breed of collectors who amass quiet piles of treasures with knowledge and an anticipation that these will accumulate wealth.
For most people a piece of agarwood (gingko or aloeswood) looks like any other piece of deadwood. But for Sun Guang’e, the curator of the Shanghai Jiahe Agarwood Culture Museum, who has been collecting and studying agarwood for 20 years, agarwood is not just a delicately scented wood but a cultural heritage.
Regarded as the “diamond of wood”, good examples of agarwood at the international auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s fetch more than $10,000 a gram, 100 times the price of gold. Compared with art, jade and porcelain, agarwood is becoming a very popular collector’s item for wealthy Chinese although the tuhao seem to miss out here. “Most tuhao wouldn’t know about agarwood. They spend tens of millions of yuan on fake or poor-quality agarwood, which is a pity,” Sun Guang’e said.
Origins are vital
Sun said that to distinguish good agarwood from low-quality stuff, a collector must first know where the agarwood comes from. Agarwood contains a resin generated from only a rare species of fungus-infected evergreen trees. These trees only grow in certain warm and wet areas. In Asia the tree species include aquilaria sinensis which is found in China’s Hainan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi and Guangdong, along with aquilaria agallocha from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and aquilaria crassna from Malaysia and Indonesia. The price for agarwood varies from hundreds of yuan to tens of thousands of yuan per gram depending on the quality of the example.
Agarwood is precious because of the way it is formed. Only a few specific species of trees are affected by the fungus which provokes the trees into producing the rich rare resin and oil that make agarwood so distinctive. It is also a lengthy process. In the aquilaria sinensis tree species it takes at least 30 years to produce the resin and high-quality resin will need another 20 years to develop.
Looking for and processing agarwood is painstaking. Sun Guang’e recalled a search for agarwood with farmers on Wuzhi Mountain in Hainan Province in 2007. It took her four hours on a motorbike to arrive at an area deep in a forest where agarwood might be found. They camped there for a month.
The Science about Agarwood
Hunting at night
Experts can only hunt for agarwood at night in the dark. When they smelt the aroma, the farmers marked the spot on the ground and returned in daylight to check their finds. The resin-bearing trees are often found in swamps which can make the search physically dangerous.
Then the process of removing the deadwood and exposing the resin-affected parts of the trees can take another six months.
The value of agarwood is dependent upon the aroma it produces. Top-quality agarwood should include six scents – fish, spicy, mint, sweet, herbaceous and bitter. “Agarwood aromas are used in traditional medicine to help heal people and also for pure pleasure,” Sun said.
Agarwood was used in China 2,000 years ago but then it was a product fit for the royal court and only emperors, empresses and concubines could enjoy it. “Even in the Sui Dynasty (581-618) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the resin was regarded as very precious although aristocrats used it constantly, either in a powdered form or putting it in water to wash their faces. In the old days people measured tea and ordinary crops by what they called a dan which equaled 75 kilograms, gold was measured by the ton but agarwood was only measured by the liang which equaled 50 grams – which shows how rare it was even then,” she said.
The earliest records of agarwood are found in Chinese medical writings. According to the Compendium of Materia Medica, or Bencao Gangmu (a book on Chinese herbal medicine compiled by Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) doctor Li Shizhen), the most important thing about agarwood was its many applications in medicine. “The six different scents of agarwood have different functions. The fish scent is good for the nerves, the spicy scent stimulates the mind, the herbal scent has an anesthetic effect, the sweet scent is good for the lungs, the mint is refreshing, and the bitter scent can reduce internal heat. These natural smells are completely different from the synthetic scents used in perfumes,” Sun Guang’e said.
She has seen the positive effect of agarwood herself. A few years ago when Sun’s mother was hospitalized with a serious heart complaint, Sun gave her some small pieces of agarwood. Her mother recovered but the women she shared a room with in the hospital and who were suffering from similar complaints died. Sun believes the agarwood saved her mother’s life.
Because it is rare and extremely valuable some traders try to sell fake agarwood. Sun was given one piece of fake agarwood cleverly disguised as the real thing, imbedded in a piece of a genuine tree. She eventually burned a fragment and immediately smelt traces of asphalt which would not be detectable in the genuine article.
Plantations cultivated
Although agarwood plantations are being cultivated in Hainan Province, Sun does not think the quality of this agarwood is anywhere near the quality of the natural product. “Artificially grown agarwood is infected by a synthetic fungus, and the resin is cultivated and grown quickly.. The scent and the quality cannot match the natural product.”
The Chinese tuhao have also taken to buying elegant furniture and carvings made of wumu, black fossilized ebony. It achieves its unique density and colors from being buried underground for thousands of years..
While most trees buried for thousands of years become coal, a few turn into this rare type of wood that when polished becomes an ideal form for carving delicate and beautiful pieces of furniture or ornamentation.
Zhu Ping, the director of the Wood Science Research Center of the Shanghai Timber Trade Association, said wumu is wood at an early stage of silicification where it could become, over thousands of years, a stonelike substance.
Because of its rarity and because it is now so expensive and hard to find, it made the headlines recently. In September, Liang Cai, a villager from Xiushui county in Jiangxi Province extracted a huge 80-ton block of wumu from a nearby river. He used an excavator and spent a great deal of time and money on the project mainly because he believed the wumu was worth millions of yuan.
Government claim
However under Chinese law, anything recovered from below ground belongs to the State unless the finder can prove that his forebears owned it legally. The local government immediately claimed the block of wumu and although scientific testing has not yet established exactly how much it could be worth, the action created a good deal of controversy.
Most recently the government has offered to compensate him 75,000 yuan ($12,356) for the expense he incurred in the extraction.
Of all the varieties of wumu, a type found mainly in Sichuan and produced from a laurel tree species is the most highly prized. Items made from this can fetch millions of yuan, a hundred times the cost of other types of wumu.
But not every collector knows what he or she is getting. “In the past, this laurel tree wumu was mostly used for making coffins because of its quality. Now investors and speculators are driving the price up even though there is still a great deal of this buried in Sichuan Province. And many tuhao collectors know little about this and less about what wumu is exactly. They buy carved ornaments that have been made from coffin wood and don’t realize their origins,” Zhu said.
In the 1960s, when Xu Guoxi, the antiques’ connoisseur of the Art Identification Center at the Shanghai Federation of Literary and Art Circles, started to work in antiques and artworks, Chinese mila, a form of amber, was not valued as highly as amber. Mila is a yellow resin like amber, but is formed under different conditions and is not as transparent.
However, perhaps because of the cultural background, mila is becoming popular among collectors. Overseas it is often used to make jewelry but few foreigners collect it as such.
“Because nowadays Chinese calligraphy, jade, porcelain and other traditional antiques fetch high prices and there are fewer quality items, rich people have begun looking at mila. And obviously some crooks are now making fake mila items,” said Xu.
Fakes prevalent
Other collectors are amassing rhinoceros horn. Xu said in the 1960s rhinoceros horn cost 96 yuan for 30 grams, a little more expensive than gold which was then 94 yuan for 30 grams. Today rhinoceros horn is priced at more than 100,000 yuan for 50 grams. Fakes are also prevalent here. “Some people have worked out a way of fashioning horses’ hooves into rhino horns,” Xu said.
He warned that although more wealthy Chinese have begun collecting rare items, not everyone can make a profit through collecting. Successful collectors need financial resources and courage – “You have to be confident with the money you spend collecting.” They also need to be aware. “As the market expands there are more and more fakes being offered. People make money selling fake items because the buyers don’t know enough about their collections.” Finally a successful collector needs patience. “You can’t make money by selling a collection soon after you have acquired it. You have to wait for the price to rise and it is not always easy to sell good items.”
Aquilaria crassna – Critically Endangered Agarwood is the highly fragrant and valuable resin used for the production of perfumes, incense, medicine and cosmetics and is generated by the Indomalesian tree genus Aquilaria. Agarwood has been used and traded internationally for over 2000 years. Habitat loss and overexploitation through increased demand have dramatically contributed to the decline of agarwood-producing Aquilaria populations. The resin is produced by the tree in response to infection by a parasitic fungus. Signs of presence of agarwood in Aquilaria are not obvious to exploiters lacking in local knowledge. As a result, trees are often cut down indiscriminately in the search for resin with a negative impact on the entire forest ecosystem. In Cambodia, agarwood collection is important to rural communities whose livelihood depends on collecting and selling resin-laden wood.
Bokor National Park (BNP) is one of Cambodia’s largest national parks, containing 14,000 ha of forest that holds a wealth of biodiversity. The construction of the largest hydroelectric dam in Cambodia began in 2007 inside the Park on the Kamchay River in a bamboo and rattan rich area of forest. Land clearance for the dam has already destroyed large tracts of bamboo forest. Half of the Park’s 4,000 ha of bamboo and rattan, along the banks of Kamchay River, will be flooded and lost along with the wealth of biodiversity held within this area and local peoples’ livelihoods as their access to these resources becomes increasingly marginalised. The most important way of generating income for local communities, including O Toch Village, is weaving and selling baskets for the fishing industry. These baskets are made from the bamboo and rattan that grows along the Kamchay River running through the Park (bamboo is used to weave the baskets and rattan to make the handles). In contrast to other rural areas in Cambodia where approximately 85% of the local community depends on agriculture, 95% of O Toch village families rely on producing and selling baskets. The market for baskets is increasing as the fishing industry expands on Tonle Sap Great Lake. As a result, larger quantities of bamboo and rattan are being extracted.. Timber trees were logged out from the degraded forest many years ago, but are an essential component of mature forest. Therefore, timber trees are included in this forest rehabilitation effort. Those trees that will be planted in the sustainable use zone of the CPA will yield timber in future years that can be used by the local communities..
This project concerns both the conservation of the highly threatened Aquilaria as well as the foundation of sustainable livelihoods for the O Toch village. The programme of activities has three streams. Firstly, the study and collection of plant propagation material of Aquilaria, bamboos and rattans from the wild was undertaken. The establishment of a functional nursery facility was completed followed by the propagation and cultivation of the selected species. Repopulation and reintroduction of the plants in-situ was followed by monitoring and surveying of the young plants. The second stream of activities concerned the establishment of the community protected area. The area will be managed and secured by the people of the O Toch village. Decisions over resource management are made democratically in community group meetings. The CPA council is made up of members of the community who were elected by the community to represent them. This area is intended to provide the local community with a sustainable source for their use and long-term development. The third area of activity was centred around training. An international expert in the sustainable use of non-timber forest products instructed and demonstrated the skills and techniques that would be most valuable to the community..In particular the training looked at aspects of plant nursery management, agarwood cultivation techniques and sustainable harvesting methods.
The in-situ/ex-situ conservation of Aquilaria and other species will continue with new plants being used for repopulation and reintroduction. This phase of the project involving integrated practical conservation and local capacity building has provided a solid foundation for both local populations of Aquilaria and community resource sustainability. This project will continue in order to secure long-term advancement for plants and people.
From incense to enjoy fun in the formation Kodo (home direct) in Japan
Future bride has never
Furnace motor that direction than this film.
Order
Gonorrhea in the United hardness,
Sometimes other stones rolling into gold.
Sawfish
The fragrance materials (香料 flavors) are generally derived from plants (flowers, fruits, roots, leaves, or tree sap), animal or mineral. Until now, the spices are still the most loving thing aromatic wood (rustic flavor 香木). Cinnamon (cinnamon) and downs (or agalloch aloeswood) are two typical kinds of fragrant wood of Vietnam.
According to the pundits Pham Hoang Ho, types of depression are common in Vietnam as agarwood trees (Aquilaria crassna) worm eaten, secrete resin, then hardens into senior ma. Wood plastic ball bearing plant which has a large share, drop into the water will “sink”.. “Depression” 沉 kanji means sinking, and the “downs” were derived.
“Frankincense” (沉香 Jinko, “sinking fragrance”), as defined by the dictionary Kojien, is “natural flavor ingredients drawn from sycamore high ‘trade continent’. A tree in tropical Africa, 10 meters high general level, hardware and submerged bodies. White flowers. Buried underground plant, or provisional, the plant will pay ‘part is’ 伽罗 with velvety black, scented eminent and very expensive “.
This is true of tree crops grow by vote of the jungle. “Frankincense” is the main trunk contains myrrh. As long live election becomes large and the radio station. Ca dao She said: “As long as the bar offers up”, but added that we balance the tree so you do not have to bow brooch bar, lucky to have any are.
“South America” is considered the best bass. Depression does not have in Japan and China, but only in Southeast Asia. “South America” special only in central Vietnam from Thanh Hoa to Khanh Hoa on – plots with a catchy name, but true, is the “Land of incense”!
Depression in the central province famous in the world with an elegant aroma, posing. Documents oldest Agarwood Japan’s Nihon Shoki (日本 书 纪 Japanese secretary; composing completed in 720 AD).
According to this book, by the year 595 AD has “drifted feat brooch on Awaji-shima Island [Dam-island highway]”, near the city of Kobe now. “Love This brooch is 1 meter 80 circumference. Residents on the island do not know it’s brooch, providing fuel for cooking out. Emit fumes and smell fragrant radiate away. People were astonished [but guess what is provided], offered to bring wild [at this time was Emperor Suiko] “. Meanwhile, there are Prince Shotoku was measured immediately knew Frankincense (Jinko).
We can surmise this feat away from the Central brooch (VI century depending on Champa) and the Kuroshio warm current to drift up north and then turned into Japan. Scales added that this Kuroshio ocean current provision originated in central Vietnam.
When I first arrived in Japan, the bass is used in Shinto priest (Shinto / Shintoism) and Buddhism. Then, Frankincense an increasingly critical role in Buddhist ceremonies. Step into the Nara period (710-794 AD), this ritual ceremony to become a national identity and continues until the Meiji Restoration (1868).
This little note is an important role in the history of frankincense exchanges between Vietnam and Japan. Year are considered private lands to the Viet Nam is often kyara 伽罗 Japanese call.
According to company depending Kyozaburo Nakata Baieido (Mai-Vinh Duong), to establish from 1657, called “period in” the famous la la Cham Cham by these people to trade “period in” from the beginning. The name “man up” is the sum of Sanskrit (Sanskrit) “kara” meaning color “black”, and that a “bak” in Chinese means “tree, wood” (木 moc). With the synthesis of the two languages, we have the word “kalambak”, then this is a rustic abridge investment to become “man up”, ie, “Blackwood”, as we have today.
Nowadays it is no coincidence that this particular kind of depression from the Sanskrit root, because the silk road on the sea (Sea Silk Road) is also a way to spread Buddhism from India, and agarwood Men went down that road with Buddhism. Her childhood Champa also influenced by Indian civilization, instead of Chinese civilization as Vietnam.
There are many anecdotes about agarwood passion of the historical figures in Japan. In Shosoin (正 仓 院 Main Senate) – the store treasures and Buddhist texts situated within the precincts Todaiji (东大寺 East pronoun) in Nara – a song agarwood called Ranjatai (兰 奢 待Dai Lan) about 1 and a half meters long. All three men contributed to the cause of the unification of Japan in the late sixteenth century as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu were poised eyeing each segment depression ranks as “spiritual security” is. Surely treasures are considered a symbol of authority. Legend Nobunaga for roughly two pieces, each piece about 40 long division; emperor offered a piece, a piece of the solution to the heady drink tea. Hideyoshi also seemed to mimic the roughly Nobunaga as a military genius also gregarious with the tea. It is believed that this feat Ranjatai because God has provided for sour wild Todaiji on 756 years. Currently, Ranjatai can see every 10 or 15 years Shosoin exhibition of National Museum in the city of Nara. Love this Ranjatai Kaisuke by Yoneda, an expert on the subject Frankincense Museum Osaka, is predictable travel from Lao or Vietnam.
As for Tokugawa Ieyasu – shogun (general) of the first Tokugawa government – but it sure is the wrong person to watch Ieyasu song Ranjatai downs, but no one knows that he has to take carved or not. However, through this letter that is left behind, we know is very addictive bass and Ieyasu had sent a letter to the king of Champa and the Nguyen please send agarwood.
Letters sent by the king of Champa Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1606 stating: “We want to have the upper of fine sediments. The quality of both or just below average, please do not post because we have so much already “. Through writing, we also know that at least two in 1605 and 1606, Lord Nguyen Hoang send a holiday gift to meet Tokugawa Ieyasu, where a piece of agarwood 1, both times for a loss. Earlier, on eternal Genroku (Central time), ie from 1592 to 1595, Lord Nguyen sent Bugyo Gift Nagasaki (a dozen like Tran Thu) weighed half blue and other gifts. A more interesting and significant is the list of gifts between the East Asian countries, depression is always listed first and the brooch is often seen as a precious gift of diplomatic relations with Japan and China. After Ieyasu’s death, heard of his relics to agarwood over 100 kilos and 180 kilos more than the other types of depression. This shows Ieyasu was delight to enjoy incense extent.
According to research by Sadao Ogura, commodities fall as Japanese imports from Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, Siam [Thailand is now], Borneo, etc.) during the trade fair “trade with paper boat allow European publications “(Shuinsen 朱 印 船) at the end of the sixteenth century – the early seventeenth century that Japan now imports still further. According to Ogura, Japan and downs of imports from Vietnam accounted for 70% of Japan’s total imports of depression in Asian grace period, and until 1987, deposits of Japan from Vietnam is 16 tons, still accounts for about 50% total deposits of Japanese imports (about 32 tons).
But in the past, Vietnam and Indonesia, Indonesia plays a important role in exporting to Japan brooch, that role is now replaced by Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand.
Compared with the popular art of the Japanese as the tea ceremony (Sado), direct mail (Shodo, calligraphy ie Han), Kendo (Kendo), Bushido (Bushido) or as directed (judo), kodo (香 道 flavor director) little known people of our country. An interesting fact is that even in Japan is also not much is known of the history Kodo also recorded the exchange between the Central piece of land with Japan since ancient times.
Kodo (Way of incense / VOIE de l’encens) is frankincense enjoy art, art is literally “smell” the smell frankincense – a unique art show only in Japan but not in other countries . Although the new Kodo XV century shaped, but in fact enjoy this elegant animal was derived from the introduction of Buddhism to Japan from about the sixth century.
In Buddhist ceremonies, the most important festival is usually offered incense tape. From 1500 years ago, is offering incense offerings to Buddha statues wipe, or when monks chant.
Dot brooch of sour Todaiji, Nara, Japan
Gradually, elegant aroma of incense increasingly favored the Japanese, Kyoto nobility in the Heian period (794-1185) in the deep burning love for “the fragrant aroma door” page and aromatic medicine. As the rise and fall of this hobby burn (the Japanese called sora-dakimono 空 炊き もの), competitions and downs – like poetry contest or flower arrangement competition – held that there Identification deep scent most elegant.
But the stuff used sora-la dakimono the fresh materials of traditional medicine. Thu burning brooch rustic but not popular among aristocrats who often raced guess most aromatic kind and special features between incense.
With the introduction of the government’s fighter class (samurai) by the end of XII century, the influence of Zen on Japanese culture increasingly bold. Due to the influence of income brooch oriented Tong (China), the Japanese switched to neriko (煉り 香) with the way frankincense blended together like Jinko beginning. With this approach, the arts enjoy pressing “smell” incense (闻 香 Bunko or monko, ie “cultural flavor”) one step further to then be shaped as type Kodo (native religion) into the team Muromachi ( 1336-1573).
From this time, bass sora-burning hobby dakimono more or less glitz, been replaced by the smell in the air and fall silent dim – consistent with inward spiritual life and sense of aesthetics permeability flowing bias of boxers.
Frankincense Rikkoku (“After Water”)
In Kodo, convertible brooch freedom are classified as “your source of government” (五味 六 国, ie, “in the following flavors and water”). In flavor is sweet, sour, spicy, salty, and lead. “After the water” after the place was literally frankincense production, that’s Kyara, Rakoku, Manaban, Manaka, Sasora and Sumatora. By dividing your incense connoisseurs Ashikaga Yoshimasa shogunate (1436-1490) appointed, “after the country” that is:
Kyara (伽罗 Gia la) As noted above, the original text was in Sanskrit kara, meaning “black”. The best type of incense, perfumed elegance. Only in Vietnam.
Rakoku (罗 国 La Defense) Mui pungent bitter taste, salt and pepper. Only in Thai.
Manaban (真 南蛮 Legs Male Man) There are many native and plastic they are almost sweet, but does not seem to “Features” page. Available in the East of India, or between Malaysia and India.
Manaka (真 那伽 Chan Gia Na) In the aroma, but, this is probably the lightest scent. Available in Malacca (Malaysia).
Sasora (佐 曾 罗 I Increase La) Co mild scent. With a type sasora well, you’re mistaken kyara goats, especially when each time. Available in western India.
Sumatora (寸 闻 多 罗 Village Van Da La) A lot of plastic and sour. There is much in Sumatra (Indonesia a).
Under the Muromachi, frankincense enjoy art began to develop in parallel with the art of tea drinking.
Various competitions have content and different forms of racing was born. First and foremost is the “tea fight” (tocha 闘 茶) requires participants to predict quality teas. Then they hold both tea and playing bass to see who can distinguish 10 teas and 10 different types of depression. In the examination of the distribution of incense, the participants were divided into two groups, each implementation guess the origin, background, characteristics of each type of known deposits, such as odor, smoke rises shaped like how, etc. ..
Eventually, in addition to the ability to enjoy incense, the competitors also have cultural knowledge and aesthetic intuition – is literally the ability to perceive something beautiful. In front of you to see, heady bass will come from this type of Others, like the different sides of a poem renga (连 歌 related cases). Each heady bass, contestants must do a poetry appreciation scents remind the names and types of deposits have burned. Finally, we will have a renga poem about the smell of incense in the contest.
The combination of interesting flavor to enjoy brooch trend pursuit of something beautiful, collectively bi (美 my) or bigaku (美学 my school), in traditional Japanese literature can say is the determining factor the formation of Kodo.
Kodo has reflected the depth of culture to enjoy, just to show u elegant beauty of incense, which also has to describe many different literary topics. Therefore, Kodo is seen as a unique art of Japan.
Distilling agarwood and processing the resinated heartwood involves cycles of laborious work. After the felling of the tree, it begins with the tremendous task of chopping the tree trunk and segregating it to serve the different purposes. The white wood and barely resinated sectors of the tree trunk and branches usually go into the distillation stills while the resinous part of the Oud wood is processed and cleaned further as these valuables are meant for fumigation use. The leaves are collected and filtered for agarwood tea production while the leftover pile of agarwood waste material in the stills, after the completion of its distillation, is collected to make agarwood cones and incense sticks.
Depending on the size of the tree, it can take up to a week or more for the whole trunk and branches to be segregated according to its different intentions. For woods meant to be distilled into pure Oud oils,, it will take further laborious work to shred the wood into smaller pieces, before it can be thrown into the wood grinder to make into the size of wood shavings and sawdust. Only then will the agarwood material be fit for distillation.
In this particular small sized distillery on the outskirts of an ancient jungle, north east of Borneo, the woodhunters had just felled a wild tree which grew in an area that had just been privatised. This 2560kg agarwood tree was already labelled to be felled due to its amazing resin content a couple of years prior, after the discovery of its resinous core through the scraping of the tree’s bark.
Every single bit and part of this amazing agarwood tree was already sold even before it was felled. Towards the end of the night of the first distillation, there had been signs of a great yield – averaging 0.94ml for every kilo in the stills.
The first time Mike Perez wore dehn al-oud — an essential oil distilled from the resin of Asian Aquilaria trees — he was so appalled by the smell that he hid inside his home.
“I put on way too much, and frankly, it smelled like animal butt,” says Perez, a 42-year-old manager for Barclay’s Real Estate Group in Miami.
Fragrances reveal their true nature as they evaporate on the skin, Bloomberg Pursuits magazine will report in its Autumn 2013 issue, so Perez resisted the temptation to wash.
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“The barnyard note started changing into something intensely woody, damp and complex,” recalls the fragrance enthusiast, who has a collection of almost 1,500 scents. “It lasted 24 hours, and by then, I understood why some have described oud as transcendent. I invited a friend over to try a tiny swipe; after the initial shock, he became emotional as it evoked memories of a boyhood vacation by a lake and the smell of his skin and bathing suit and even the dock drying in the summer sun.”
Akin to such potent, primeval scents as ambergris and Himalayan deer musk, oud (the name means wood in Arabic) is an alluring mystery even to those who know it well. Used by the Ancient Egyptians for embalming and mentioned in the Bible’s Song of Solomon, the resin is produced by a rare and little-understood defense mechanism: When disease-carrying microbes breach the trunk of an Aquilaria tree, a dark and extremely aromatic resin is secreted, invisible beneath the outer bark.
Burned as Incense
For reasons still unknown to science, fewer than 2 percent of wild Aquilaria trees ever produce resin. For centuries, scent hunters have indiscriminately cut down old-growth forests in search of the substance, which is burned as incense, carved into ritual objects or distilled into the most valuable natural oil on earth.
Half a teaspoon of oud oil made from 100-year-old trees for Oman’s Sultan Qaboos in 1982 sold to a private collector in 2012 for $7,000. In China, demand for top-quality resin has pushed prices as high as $300,000 per kilogram. Despite a ban on the harvesting of wild Aquilaria by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, such pricing has triggered widespread poaching and a race to perfect sustainable techniques for artificially infecting farmed trees.
Smell of Money
To the $31.6 billion fragrance industry, oud and its aficionados smell like one thing: money. Sales of oud fragrances rose 34 percent in 2012, according to New York-based consumer research firm NPD Group Inc. Such scents were virtually unheard of in the global market before 2002, when Yves Saint Laurent released Tom Ford’s M7, widely acknowledged as the first Western oud fragrance.
Today, out of more than a thousand new scents released annually, one in eight contains oud. The developing taste for oud reflects “trends for intense, intriguing, daring scents that tap into a desire to travel and experience other cultures,” fragrance historian Elena Vosnaki says, and has helped drive sales of prestige male fragrances in the U.S. alone to $953 million. In the past year, Armani, Dior (CDI), Ferrari and even the Body Shop have all jumped on the bandwagon.
Perfumer Kilian Hennessy — the cognac heir who introduced Musk Oud, the latest in his line of oud fragrances, in June under the By Kilian label — caught the bug on a 2008 trip to Dubai, where oud incense wafting through malls, mosques and hotel lobbies has become as signature a scent as lavender is to Grasse, France.
‘Weapon of Seduction’
“To Westerners, men’s fragrance is a weapon of seduction,” Hennessy says. “But to people in the Arab Gulf, oud is comforting, part of their olfactory world and an envelope in which they feel protected.” The oud used in all By Kilian fragrances is synthetic, bioengineered to approximate the real deal. That said, “I have never smelled a synthetic oud that re-creates the complexity and intensity of the real one,” Hennessy says.
According to Robert Blanchette, a forest pathologist at the University of Minnesota, the scent released by the highest-grade natural oud oils comprises more than 150 separate compounds.
“Even with mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, we still don’t have the complete signature,” he says.
Blanchette, who has spent two decades investigating Aquilaria trees in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based Rainforest Project foundation, has patented a technique to artificially infect saplings, 100 percent of which go on to produce resin, although it’s less dense than that of centuries-old trees.
Chemical Signature
“The chemical signature is very close, and our hope is that in the future, it will become a viable source,” he says.
Meanwhile, “harvesting wild trees will eventually kill oud, because of the loss of biodiversity,” says Ensar, an online purveyor of organic oud who declines to reveal his full name and who spends much of the year in Asia seeking out the best resin.
“Aquilaria trees have to fight disease and sometimes die for oud to come into existence,” he says. “I wanted to cry when I cut down a farmer’s 60-year-old tree in Thailand that was fully loaded with resin. It’s all extremely existential.”
“Oud takes a commitment, both financially and in the way you wear it,” Barclay’s Perez says. “I wear it only on special occasions and never to the office. But most of the time, I wear it for myself.”
An ordinary looking tree by-product from the Forests of New Guinea is driving an unprecedented craze on the island. Agarwood, also known as gaharu and eaglewood, is a much-sought product that is being extracted faster than its natural recovery.
With help from our friends,, WWF is trying to make sure that agarwood continues to provide for local people’s needs in the decades ahead – without jeopardizing its natural occurrence.
This fragrant resinous wood, formed in the trees of the genera Gyrinops, Aetoxylon, Gongystylis and, more commonly, Aquilaria, has historically been in great demand from places such as Japan and the Middle East. It continues to be widely exported from places like New Guinea and the Heart of Borneo.
Victim of its popularity
High demand and decreasing supplies are pushing the price of agarwood up.. Another side effect is the indiscriminate destruction of trees.
Now, populations of 8 species of Aquilaria have declined to the point where they have been categorized as threatened, according to the IUCN – The World Conservation Union. Adding to the problem is the inability of planted trees to produce the valuable resinous wood, making plantations to date worthless.
Redressing the trade
TRAFFIC, WWF’s and IUCN’s wildlife trade monitoring arm, has documented in detail the pressures on agarwood. Based on the trends suggesting over-exploitation of this heartwood, WWF has taken a range of steps in PNG to ensure trade is sustainable, including:
Assessment of agarwood management areas
Development of a framework to promote the sustainable management of agarwood resources
Design of a community-based agarwood management plan
To educate and train local communities about the importance of agarwood as a resource, and encourage sustainable management of the industry, WWF has teamed up with local authorities and other non-government organizations under a project funded by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
Agarwood management teams have been set up in selected locations around PNG to work directly with rural agarwood farmers in practising and promoting sustainable harvest and trade.
WWF achievements
Our knowledge of agarwood distribution has considerably increased over the past few years, as a result of biological surveys conducted by WWF and partners. These surveys have also resulted in the identification of at least 2 new species of agarwood in PNG.
The Eaglewood Management Area concept will protect the habitat of at least 200,000 ha of agarwood forest.
Training has been provided in low impact harvesting techniques for agarwood.
A TRAFFIC study supported by WWF has identified that agarwood is improving village incomes in some areaS of PNG by up to 10-fold.
Villages are receiving much higher prices for agarwood sales following training in harvesting and marketing conducted by WWF and partners.
Several years ago, in the perfume and incense market in the old city of Sana’a in Yemen, I caught sight of a large apothecary jar full of wood chips. The jar sat on a dusty shelf, tucked away in a dark corner of the stall owned by Mohammed Hamoud al-Kalagi. When I asked him to show me its contents, he placed the jar on the front counter and pulled out a chip of wood. Mohammed called the wood ‘ud (pronounced ood), a name I did not recognize, but it looked very familiar. I could hardly contain my growing sense of excitement as I examined it closely.
Mohammed placed a tiny sliver of the wood on the end of a lit cigarette. Within moments we were inhaling a rich, sweet, woody fragrance that I had first smelled in the Borneo rain forest 15 years earlier. At that time, I was traveling with a group of nomadic hunter-gatherers known as Penan. We were looking for herbs used in traditional medicine, but one day the Penan cut down a tree and collected pockets of fragrant wood from within the trunk and branches. They called these dark patches of wood gaharu. I rubbed a small piece of gaharu between my palms to warm it, and it smelled like cedar and sandalwood, but with subtle fragrance notes of roses and balsam. For years I had wondered what the wood was used for and where it was sent after leaving Borneo. The Penan thought gaharu might be used in Chinese medicine,, because it was the upriver Chinese traders that bought it, but apart from that, they were mystified as to why anyone would want to buy those gnarly bits of wood.
Mohammed al-Kalagi, who thought that ‘ud came only from India, was the first person to help me begin to unravel the long and convoluted history of this scented wood. He told me it was burned as incense throughout the Islamic world, and an oil was extracted from it that retailed for nearly $20 a gram ($500 an ounce) as a perfume.
When I told Mohammed that the gaharu collectors in Borneo considered the wood to have only a modest barter value, he laughed and recited lines that he attributed to the eighth-century Egyptian jurist and poet Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi’i:
Gold is just dust when still in the ground.
And ‘ud, in its country of origin,
Is just another kind of firewood.
A few days after my visit, I walked through the narrow streets of old Sana’a to the home of Yemeni friends. The family lived in a tastefully restored stone tower house in the Turkish Quarter, and during the meal that night I discovered that ‘ud has domestic uses beyond simple incense: A small chip placed amid the tobacco in the bowl of the mada’ah, or water pipe, sweetens the smoke and keeps the pipe fresh. And although ‘ud is generally considered more of a man’s scent, it is also used by women who place bits of the wood in a mabkharah, a small, hand-held charcoal brazier used to scent clothes; it is also used to perfume hair and skin. My host explained that at women’s get-togethers it would be considered strange not to pass around a mabkharah of smoldering ‘ud or other incense so the female guests could perfume themselves.
“When you walk by a woman on the street and you smell ‘ud, you know that she is from a good family,” the husband told me.. “It is a sign of wealth, good breeding, refinement and status.”
Similarly, when Yemeni men congregate, it is customary for them to pass around a mabkharah of ‘ud. Each man opens his jacket and censes his shirt and underarms, then his face and his mashedah, or head scarf, if he is wearing one. The mabkharah is always passed counter-clockwise, and each man wafts the smoke onto himself and says, “God’s blessings and peace on the Prophet Muhammad.” ‘Ud is burned ceremonially at weddings, too, and the oil is sometimes used to perfume the body of the dead before burial.
In Yemen, the price and quality of ‘ud varies considerably: At an average wedding party in Sana’a it is considered appropriate to spend about $30 to $50 by burning 50 or 100 grams (two or three ounces) of one of the less expensive grades of ‘ud, but for the well-heeled, 30 grams (a single ounce) of a superior grade can set one back $250 to $300.
Before I left the dinner party that night, my host placed a tiny drop of ‘ud oil on the front of my shirt and explained that the fragrance would survive several washings—which it did. ‘Ud oil is often placed on older men’s beards or younger men’s jacket lapels so that during the traditional cheek-to-cheek greetings its sweet, woody scent dominates.
Although the southern Arabian Peninsula has been long identified with aromatics, few Westerners are familiar with ‘ud, a word that means simply “wood” in Arabic. This obscurity is partly due to ‘ud rarity and cost, but it is also a matter of varying taste and differing cultural traditions. During the Hajj, for example, Muslim pilgrims from around the world come to Makkah and Madinah, where many are introduced to the scent of ‘ud, which is burned in the Great Mosque as well as in many other mosques throughout Saudi Arabia. ‘Ud produces a fragrance that is not soon forgotten, and for this reason small packets of ‘ud chips are a common souvenir to take home from the Hajj.
In various other places in the Islamic world, ‘ud is burned to help celebrate the important events of everyday life. In Tunisia, for example, ‘ud is burned on the third, seventh and 40th days following the birth of a child, a time when the mother traditionally remains at home while female relatives and friends come to visit.
Throughout Malaysia and Indonesia, ‘ud is called by the name I first heard in Borneo, gaharu, a Malay word derived from the much older Sanskrit term agaru, meaning “heavy.” The scented wood was given that name because, indeed, a high-quality piece of gaharu will sink in water. The Susruta Samhita, one of the “great three” texts of Ayurvedic medicine, describes how people of the Ganges plain used smoldering agaru for worship, as perfume and to fumigate surgical wounds. In those times, agaru came largely from the tree Aquilaria agallocha, which was found in the foothills of Assam.
In the 16th century, the Portuguese, who were actively trading in Goa, Malacca and Macao, adapted the word agaru to pao d’aguila, or “eagle wood”—which at least had a meaning in Portuguese, though there is no connection between eagles and ‘ud. In the English-speaking world today, the most common terms for ‘ud are aloeswood or agarswood; this last word preserves a clear link to the original Sanskrit.
The best grade of ‘ud is hard, nearly black and very heavy. In general, ‘ud becomes inferior as it appears lighter in tone, flecked with diminishing amounts of resin. The only truly reliable way to test for quality, however, is to burn a small bit and evaluate the complexity and richness of the smoldering wood. ‘Ud oil can be taste-tested: Touch a bit to your tongue, and a bitter taste points to high quality.
Historians are uncertain when ‘ud first reached the Middle East. There are several references to “aloes” in the Old Testament, and estimates by historians of China Friedrich Hirth and W.W. Rockhill put the date as far back as the 10th century BC. This was when King Solomon began trade with the south Arabian Sabaean kingdom, which was already trading with merchants on the Malabar (western) coast of India. (See Aramco World, March/April 1998.) Written accounts of Arab and Chinese travelers and merchants that mention it date to more recent times, approximately the first century of our era, a time of accelerating trade among the Arabian Peninsula, the Malabar coast and China that was made possible by the exploitation of the seasonal monsoon winds across the Indian Ocean. At this time, frankincense and myrrh from Oman and the Hadhramaut region of southern Arabia were being traded in the Far East, so it seems reasonable to assume that a reciprocal trade in ‘ud would have traveled on the same maritime routes.
The Chinese role in the ‘ud trade has been significant since the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220), when Imperial perfume blenders used it along with cloves, musk, costus-root oil and camphor. Like the Indians, the Chinese named the wood for its density, calling it cb’en hsiang, “the incense that sinks in water.” In those days, ‘ud was sorted into as many as 20 different grades. Responding to the increasing domestic and international demand for ‘ud, Chinese traders ventured into Annam, now part of Vietnam, where they found top-quality trees in abundance. This new source of supply allowed them to become wholesale dealers and middlemen, and to this day they retain this position worldwide.
Arab and Persian traders had established settlements on the outskirts of Canton as early as 300, and a Chinese traveler named Fa-Hien noted the riches of the Arab ‘ud traders from the Hadhramaut and Oman who lived comfortably in Ceylon. The Greek geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes, writing in the sixth century, also noted that the China-Ceylon-Middle East trade included large shipments of ‘ud.
In his book Silsilat al-Tawarikh (Chain of Chronicles), Zayd ibn Hassan of Siraf (now in Iran) tells of the experiences of two mnth-century traders, one Ibn Wahab of Basra and another named Suleyman. Although they traveled at slightly different times, both reported that the price and availability of ‘ud in both Basra and Baghdad was much affected by frequent shipwrecks and by pirate attacks on trading ships. Their roughly similar routes went from the Arabian Gulf to the Maldives, Ceylon, the Nicobar Islands and then on to Canton by way of the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea. At the time, the round-trip took at least two years, for the traders had to wait for seasonal winds, and customs formalities and the complexities of doing business in China consumed a good deal of time. Hassan relates that in Canton, Suleyman saw Arab and Persian traders playing a board game that appears to have been similar to backgammon: Occasionally the playing pieces were made of rhinoceros horn or ivory, but most commonly they were carved from fragrant ‘ud.
Reading up on the history of the 12th- and 13th-century Arab-Chinese sea trade, I also came upon the Chu-fan-chi, a trade manual written by Chau Ju-kua, who was a customs official in the southern Chinese province of Kwangtung in the mid-13th century. In the text he mentions that the search for ‘ud had intensified to the point that it was being collected from Hainan Island, parts of present-day Vietnam, lands about the Malay Peninsula, Cambodia and the islands of Sumatra and Java. By this time, he observed, it had become an established custom for well-to-do Muslims to wake up, bathe and perfume themselves with ‘ud smoke before going to the mosque for the morning prayer.
In the early 14th century, Ibn Battuta described a visit to Ceylon where during a visit to Sultan Ayri Shakarwati he was shown “a bowl as large as a man’s hand, made of rubies, containing oil of aloes.” Ibn Battuta also mentioned that in Muslim lands every ‘ud tree was private property, and that the best trees grew in Qamara, or Cambodia. (See Saudi Aramco World, July/August 2000.) In Saudi Arabia today, ‘ud kambudi—Cambodian aloeswood—is still usually the most treasured and costly variety.
Isaac H. Burkill, in his 1935 Dictionary of the Economic Products of the Malay Peninsula, described ‘ud in scientific terms. It is an aromatic resin deposit found in certain species of Aquilaria trees, especially Aquilaria malaccensis, whose species name recalls the days when the ‘ud trade was centered in Malacca and dominated by the Portuguese. Burkill explains that the resin is produced by the tree as an immune response to a fungus (Phialophora parasitica) that invades the tree and, over many years, spreads through it. It is these diseased sections of the tree that are collected by people in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
To better understand the modern trade cycle from Southeast Asia to Middle Eastern homes and mosques, I returned to Borneo and traveled upriver to talk again with the Penan tribesmen who make their living collecting ‘ud, which they call gaharu.
The Penan, I learned, recognize seven types of gaharu. To collect it they paddle up small tributaries by dugout canoe, and then climb the slopes of remote mountains to locate the best trees. A gathering journey can take a week or more. Once a likely looking pohon kayu gaharu (a “gaharu-wood tree”) has been found, they make a series of shallow, exploratory cuts into its trunk, branches and roots; they cut it down only when they are persuaded the tree has the fungus and will yield a reasonable amount of good gaharu. If the tree contains only low grades of gaharu, they will often let it grow for another few years before retesting it. If they do decide to cut it down, they will spend days extracting the gaharu and cleaning it with smaller knives. Traditionally, the Penan used gaharu themselves to treat stomach aches and fevers, and as an insect repellent, but now they sell or trade all they find.
In the backwaters of Borneo, the Penan sell the very best gaharu for about $400 a kilogram, or approximately $12 an ounce. They usually sell to local Chinese traders who stockpile it until they have enough to send to wholesalers and bigger middlemen in Singapore. The Penan claim that gaharu is getting more difficult to find because large-scale logging operations have destroyed many of the hill forests where the gaharu trees are found. If a Penan group has good luck, it might collect a kilo (35 oz) of average-quality gaharu in three or four days—but it is increasingly common for them to return with nothing, or with only the lowest grades.
Thirty years ago Hong Kong played an important role in the ‘ud trade, but today the international hub is Singapore. There, the wholesale business is dominated by Chinese traders who receive ‘ud from agents scattered across Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Burma, Thailand, Borneo, Hainan Island and, most recently, Irian Jaya, Indonesia. C. P. Ng, owner of Buan Mong Heng, a emporium on North Bridge Road, is Singapore’s undisputed ‘ud king. He tells me that his best ‘ud sells for $5000 to $10,000 per kilogram ($2275-$4545/lb). At present, the rarest and most expensive type, known as Keenam, comes from Vietnam; it must be stored in a cool place to keep its scent from deteriorating. In Irian Jaya alone, he says, more than 50,000 part-time collectors supply some 30 collection centers. Throughout the Chinese community in Singapore, he says, people use ‘ud as incense in the home, for worship and during marriage ceremonies. He also explains that it can be taken with herbs to cure a stomach ache, and that the sweet smell is a cure for insomnia. “A tea made from ‘ud will warm the body and restore youthful vigor to older men,” he says.
In Singapore, ‘ud is graded in descending quality from Super AA, which is weighed out on a jeweler’s scale, to Super A, Super, and lesser grades numbered 1 through 8. The lowest quality, called kandulam in Malay, is used to make incense sticks; it sells for roughly three cents a gram ($1 per oz). The value of ‘ud shipped out of Singapore each year has been estimated to exceed $1.2 billion.
In the Middle East and in Borneo I never saw more than small amounts of ‘ud, amounting to a few pounds at most, but Singapore was different. There I visited the Nk Kittai warehouse, where cardboard boxes packed with ‘ud reached tall ceilings and wheelbarrows and shovels were the tools of choice to move quantities that perfumed the entire surrounding neighborhood. The owner, C. F. Chong, waited on buyers from India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and even Japan. In Japan, ‘ud is used in a complex fragrance guessing game called koh-do, part of the ceremonial appreciation of incense adopted from the Chinese, who still use the expression wenxiang, “listening to the incense.”
The fragrance in the hot warehouse was overpowering, and as I wandered the narrow aisles surrounded by a fortune in scented wood, I saw ‘ud logs as thick as my thigh and nearly three meters (10’) long. Workers sat on the floor cleaning up pieces of ‘ud with modified rubber-tapping knives. When I remarked that it must be a risk to store so much ‘ud in one place, Chong replied that he, like other dealers, kept his very best ‘ud locked up in vaults.
Out on the warehouse floor, buyers specified the type of ‘ud they wanted by region and quality, and then a worker would dump a pile at the buyer’s feet so that he could hand-select the individual pieces. “This is an on-the-spot business,” said Chong. “Each piece has to be evaluated.”
Each buyer’s selection was weighed, and as all of the buyers that morning were old customers, only a minimal amount of haggling led to an agreement on a price. Nobody, it seemed, bought more than he could easily carry by hand, and each parcel was tied up for stowage as in-flight baggage. The visits concluded with tea and soft drinks in Chong’s air-conditioned office.
Before leaving Singapore, I went to visit Haji V. Syed Mohammed. His shop, V. S. S. Varusai Mohamed & Sons, is just across the street from the Sultan Mosque. The store sells ‘ud, perfume, money belts, cassette tapes, shawls, skull caps and highly decorative incense burners made in Bangladesh. While we were talking, he told me of one of the most renowned ‘ud dealers in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates: Ajmal’s Perfume Manufacturing & Oudh Processing Industry. It was a fortuitous meeting, for Dubai was my next stop.
In Dubai, there are entire streets lined with shops selling ‘ud. Among them, the family-run Ajmal company is one of the largest dealers in pure and blended ‘ud perfumes in all of the Middle East. From their 22 shops throughout the Arabian Peninsula, they sell ‘ud oils from Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and their most extravagant creation is a blend of aged ‘ud oils called Dahnal Oudh al-Moattaq. The price: $850 for a 30-gram (1-oz) bottle. This is out of the reach of all but the most affluent, but nearly everyone can afford to buy modest amounts of ‘ud chips for daily use, rituals and ceremonies—which might include driving, for Dubai automotive shops sell clip-on electric braziers that plug into a car’s cigarette lighter.
Because of the popularity of ‘ud, its high price and the difficulty of collecting it from the wild, several companies in peninsular Malaysia and India have begun to look into the possibility of artificially introducing the ‘ud fungus into Aquilaria trees in hopes of creating commercial ‘ud plantations. Thousands of trees have been inoculated with the fungus and people are waiting to see if the ‘ud will start to grow, and if perhaps they can even harvest it without cutting down the tree.
Nearly a year after my visits to Singapore and Dubai, another trip took me back to Borneo. I ran into a group of Penan friends at the riverside shop of Towkay Yong Khi Liang, a Hakka Chinese trader on the upper Limbang River in Sarawak. The Penan had just traded a kilo of low-quality ‘ud for a few sacks of sago flour, a replacement part for a chainsaw, some cartons of tinned food, some rolling tobacco, several pairs of cheap tennis shoes and soft drinks for everyone present.
As we stood on the dock, the Penan asked me if I had ever found out what the people in the Middle East did with the gaharu. I told them what I had discovered about the history of its trade, and then I explained the long and complicated journey it makes before arriving on the other side of the world. I described the networks of middlemen, the refined grading techniques and the marketing efforts that multiplied the price 25 times or more before it reached the final customer. They listened patiently to these facts, but what they really wanted to find out was what people did with the wood after spending so much money on it.
I suspected that they wouldn’t believe me, but I had to reveal the astonishing truth: I told them people buy ‘ud so that they can take it home and burn it.
Agarwood is the resinous heartwood from Aquilaria trees.. These trees belong to the Aquilaria genus, Thymelaeaceae family. These trees are large evergreens native to South and Southeast Asia. The trees can be easily located from an altitude of few meters above sea level to 1,000 meters above sea level. The beast growth in these trees is seen at average levels of around 400-600 meters. At least fifteen species of Aquilaria trees are known to produce the much sought-after Agarwood. The most common species found in India is Aquilaria achalloga.
Formation of aromatic resin in the tree
The trees occasionally become infected with a parasite/fungus mould and the resin is produced as a natural immune response to a fungal attack. As the fungus grows, the tree produces very rich, dark resin within the infected area. This resinous wood is valued very high and treasured around the world since the odour of this wood (agarwood) is pleasing and unique with no resemblance to other natural floral perfumes.
The resin is commonly called Jinko, Aloeswood, Agarwood or Oud and is valued in any cultures for its distinctive fragrance.
For the people who did not have the chance to experience the fragrance of this unique resinous wood of God we offer our Agarwood products click here.
In Europe it is referred to as Lignum Aquila (eaglewood) or Agarwood.
Another name is Lignum aloes or Aloeswood. This is debatable, since a genus Aloe exists which is not related to this species and generally used for medicinal purposes. However, the Aloes of the Old Testament (Num. 24:6; Ps. 45:8; Pro. 7:17; and Cant. 4:14) and of the Hebrew Bible (ahalim in Hebrew) are believed to be agarwood from Aquilaria malaccensis
Mythological History
Agarwood and its essential oil have long been associated with various religions and cultures. While it finds a mention in ancient scriptures of Japanese and Chinese dynasties it also finds mention in bible where it is referred as Aloe in old testament however this matter is debatable. It is certainly considered an aid for meditation in spiritual circles, thus it is used for incense and perfumes. Deservingly, it is also called wood of God in Asia
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Vietnam Agarwood 