Agarwood Incense (沉香): Grading & Spotting Fakes

Direct answer: Agarwood is a scar that learned to smell. When an Aquilaria tree is wounded, it seals the damage with a dark, aromatic deposit, and over years that deposit soaks into the surrounding heartwood. The tree is ordinary; the scar is the product. That is why the material is scarce, why it is graded by density, and why it is faked so often.

Key facts: 沉香 means “sinking fragrance,” because the most heavily infiltrated pieces go down in water. The top grade, 奇楠 (qínán, called kyara in Japan), is a different physical state rather than a higher rank of the same state. Wild supply is regulated under CITES, and plantation wood now fills most of the market. The old medical language around the wood belongs to history, not to clinical evidence.

Key Takeaways

• Agarwood is a wound response, not a species.
• Density is a rough measure of how much tissue has converted, and it is easy to fake.
• 奇楠 is a structure: resin has softened the fiber itself.
• Flame destroys the opening notes that make good wood worth buying.
• Every common fake adds something to the surface; none recreates the inside.
• A seller who can name species, origin, and cultivation is worth more than a certificate with no issuer.

A Scar, Not a Species

Direct answer: The genus Aquilaria sits in Thymelaeaceae, and healthy wood from its trees is pale, light, and nearly scentless. The traded material is the darkened region around an old injury.

A stand of healthy trees produces timber, not incense. The aromatic fraction may occupy a small part of one trunk, and a grower cannot know how much is there until the tree comes down. This is the first economic fact of the trade: the product is a pathological by-product, unpredictable in place and amount.

Three neighbors cause most of the confusion at a counter. Sandalwood is a different genus with a creamy scent that owes nothing to injury; the sandalwood guide covers the contrast. Oud oil is distilled from agarwood, but it is not a uniform commodity, because the wood feeding the still varies as much as the chips do. And “agarwood” is not one species. Several Aquilaria species, plus the related Gyrinops, produce material sold under the same words.

That last point is worth holding onto. A label can be botanically vague and still be honest, but the buyer should know that the word on the box names a category, not a plant.

How the Scar Forms

Direct answer: The deposit is a seal, and the sequence from injury to harvest explains why good pieces are uneven, slow, and expensive.

Here is the chain:

a branch breaks, an insect bores, or a fungus enters → the tree isolates the damage with a dark, aromatic response → the deposit spreads into neighboring tissue → the process repeats over years, layer on layer → the wood around the wound darkens and hardens → the tree is felled, or dies and ages where it stands → the rich portion is cut away from the pale timber.

The first consequence is unevenness. One face of a piece can be dark and the other pale, and cutting it changes what you own. A seller who photographs the beautiful face is not necessarily dishonest, but the photograph is not the piece.

The second is time. The deposit accumulates slowly, which is why plantation wood harvested after a few years tends to be lighter and less complex than old wild material. Cultivation shortens the clock. It does not abolish it.

The third is that “wild” and “cultivated” describe a process, not a grade. A well-managed plantation with a long grow-out and careful handling can outperform badly stored wild wood. What old wild material offers, when it is legal and documented, is age — and age is usually what the nose recognizes.

The Water Test

Direct answer: The old water test sorts material into three bands, and the bands estimate how much tissue has converted. They are not a verdict on quality.

Band	Behavior in water	What it suggests
沉水	Sinks fully	High deposit fraction, high conversion
半沉半浮	Hangs partly submerged	Medium load
浮	Floats	Lower load; older texts call it 黄熟香

Use the bands as a rough index. A floating fragment can be excellent on a heater, and a sinking block can smell dull. The test is also easy to defeat: oil injection makes pale wood heavy. A sink result is a screening step, and treating it as a certificate is how buyers pay for density that was added rather than grown.

The Top Grade

Direct answer: 奇楠 is not a better version of ordinary agarwood. It is a different physical state, one in which the deposit has taken over the tissue instead of merely filling channels within it.

Think of ordinary agarwood as hard timber threaded with dark veins. The trade calls that 木包油, wood wrapping oil, and a cross-section shows exactly that: pale fiber between the resin. 奇楠 reverses the relationship. Its 油包木, oil wrapping wood, describes a piece so thoroughly infiltrated that the grain has gone soft. It can be shaved into curls, rolled into pellets between the fingers (削之成卷、捏之成丸), and it gives off scent before it meets heat.

A buyer can use that difference as a rough filter. A hard, unyielding piece is probably ordinary. A piece with slight give and a cold aroma is worth a closer look. Neither sign proves the grade, and a seller who treats either as proof is overselling.

Color adds another layer of names: white, green, purple, yellow, black. Whether the middle colors are separate grades or stages in the darkening of green material is disputed, so the hierarchy is traditional rather than settled. Price and paperwork should carry more weight than the adjective.

The word itself has no agreed origin. Sanskrit Kāla (black), Sanskrit tagara (a fragrant plant), and a temple reading all have supporters; some scholars argue tagara is a mistranslation and that the older term is agaru or aguru. The honest position is that the etymology is uncertain. A seller who recites one theory as fact is offering confidence, not evidence.

That uncertainty is the naming trap in miniature: a prestigious word, several possible roots, and a market that profits from the ambiguity.

Four Words for Circumstance

Direct answer: The classical formation terms describe how a tree met its injury. None of them is visible in a finished piece, so each is a seller’s account rather than an observable property.

Term	Circumstance
熟结	Deposit formed in a tree that died and aged in place
生结	Deposit formed while the tree was alive
虫漏	Deposit formed around insect boring
脱落	Deposit formed at an external wound or break

A buyer can ask which term applies. The answer cannot be confirmed from the chip in hand. Treat the vocabulary as context for a story, not as a test result.

The Scent in Three Acts

Direct answer: Agarwood is valued for change rather than intensity, and gentle heat exists to let the change happen in order.

Warmth reaches the surface → the lightest compounds leave first → the surface dries → heavier fractions take over → the residue finally reads woody. The classical names are 头香 (opening), 本香 (body), and 尾香 (tail). A flame collapses the sequence: everything leaves at once, some of it degrades, and the result is a crude version of an expensive smell.

This is why traditional practice heats the wood indirectly, 隔火焚香, often with a mica plate over buried charcoal. A purpose-built electric heater does the same job with a dial. Either method lets the material speak in stages. Direct burning is possible, but it spends the opening notes before the nose has caught them.

A useful diagnostic follows: a piece that smells identical at minute one and minute twenty is either very simple material or not what the label claims. Good agarwood changes. The change is the product.

Where It Grows

Direct answer: Several species produce the material, trade names do not map cleanly onto botany, and regional labels are marketing as often as geography.

Aquilaria sinensis (白木香) is the historical Chinese source, native to Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, and Yunnan. Aquilaria malaccensis is the classic Southeast Asian trade wood, now heavily depleted and regulated. Aquilaria crassna supplies much plantation material from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Gyrinops species from eastern Indonesia, New Guinea, and Sri Lanka produce comparable deposits and enter the market under the same broad words.

Species	Region often cited	Bench note
A. malaccensis	Malaysia, Sumatra, Borneo	Classic trade wood, heavily depleted
A. sinensis	Southern China	Historical domestic source, 白木香
A. crassna	Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia	Common in plantation supply
A. beccariana	Borneo, Sumatra	Regional trade literature
Gyrinops versteegii	Eastern Indonesia	Plantation interest in recent decades
A. hirta	Malay Peninsula, Sumatra	Smaller tree, often lower load
A. khasiana	Assam, Meghalaya	Northeastern Indian material
A. rostrata	Peninsular Malaysia	Rarely traded in quantity
Gyrinops walla	Sri Lanka	Walla patta in local trade
A. filaria	New Guinea, Maluku	Remote-range species, rarely named in retail

The botanical detail sits in the Flora of China account for the genus. What matters commercially is that species names and trade names diverge. A listing that says “Cambodian” may describe a port, a style, or a story rather than a species.

Region affects character the way soil and climate affect wine: broadly, not absolutely. Hainan, Koh Kong, Quang Nam, Terengganu, Kalimantan, Assam, and Palawan all carry reputations, and all have been applied to wood that never grew there. Ask for the country of harvest and the country of processing separately. The answer reveals whether the seller has thought about the difference.

Planted, Wounded, Sorted

Direct answer: Cultivation has made genuine agarwood affordable and flooded the market with material of wildly variable quality. The category alone predicts little.

Wild material comes from trees injured naturally and left to accumulate deposit, often for decades. Legal wild wood requires harvest documentation, and the supply is small. Cultivated material comes from planted trees wounded deliberately — by boring, cutting, or inoculation — and harvested after a grow-out period.

The plantation sequence is worth knowing because it generates the questions a buyer should ask. Trees are planted and grown until the trunk can survive injury. Then the wounding begins: holes are bored, cuts are made, or a culture is introduced to provoke the defense response. The deposit spreads around the injuries over the following years. At harvest, trunks are cut into sections and sorted by eye, weight, and smell. Rich pieces go to incense and carving; pale wood goes to distillation, powder, or lower grades.

Three questions follow directly. How long was the grow-out? Which induction method was used? How many grades does the operation sort into? A supplier who answers all three is close to production. A supplier who answers none is a reseller with a story.

A short cycle yields light, deposit-poor wood. A long one costs the grower money and produces something closer to the old material. Neither wild nor cultivated is a quality guarantee; “wild” without paperwork is an adjective, and “plantation” without a grow-out figure is a category.

Four Ways to Fake It

Direct answer: The price attracts fraud, and the methods are consistent enough to learn by shape.

Method	What is done	What it fakes	What gives it away
煮油 (oil boiling)	Ordinary wood boiled in oil	Weight and a surface smell	Greasy feel, fading scent, dark smoke
高压灌油 (pressure injection)	Oil forced into pale wood	Density that passes a sink test	Oil weeps under heat, flat scent
泡药水 (dye soaking)	Non-resinous wood dyed and scented	Color and a perfume note	Uniform color, synthetic sharpness, stained water
Substitution	Unrelated woods plus fragrance compounds	A convincing look at a low price	Wrong grain, no resin lines, perfume smell

The common thread is that all four add something at the surface and none creates the deposit inside the tissue. That is why the most reliable bench observations concern structure rather than smell: dark lines wandering through pale fiber are difficult to fake, and a uniformly dark block with no pale inclusions deserves suspicion.

The authentication database collects reference material for these checks, and the grading guide explains the grade vocabulary in more depth.

What Your Hands Can Check

Direct answer: The useful tests are cheap, quick, and cumulative. No single one is proof.

1. Look at a fresh cut. Natural deposit follows grain and leaves pale wood visible between veins. Uniform darkness across a new face is a warning.
2. Warm a sliver. Gentle heat should produce a layered smell that changes over minutes. Flat, perfumed, or burnt-wood notes are failure signals.
3. Watch the smoke. Traditional accounts describe white smoke with oil seepage from genuine material; dark, sooty smoke suggests oil or additives. This is a heuristic, not a test.
4. Feel and weigh it. Oil-treated wood feels slick or tacky; aged wood feels dry and slightly waxy. Density informs only beside a known piece of similar size, and a sink test stratifies a batch rather than proving a piece.
5. Ask for paper. Species, origin, and category, in writing. A seller who cannot supply them is telling you where the risk sits.

The order matters less than the habit. A buyer who checks structure, then smell, then paperwork is harder to fool than one who relies on a single dramatic test.

Heat, Not Fire

Direct answer: Heating is not burning. The difference explains why one chip can smell ordinary on one setup and remarkable on another.

The deposit is a mixture: light mobile molecules that leave at low temperature, heavier sesquiterpenoids that need more energy, and non-volatile material that stays behind. Warm the chip gently and the fractions leave in order of volatility. Push the temperature and the order collapses.

plate temperature rises → the lightest fraction vaporizes → the nose receives the opening → the surface dries and release slows → heavier compounds dominate → the body forms → deposit near the plate exhausts → the tail thins toward woody residue.

Two rules follow. The plate should reach working temperature slowly, because a fast rise overshoots before the nose catches the opening. The session should be allowed to run down, because the tail is where a good piece separates itself from a merely strong one.

Setup	Control	Smoke	Best for
Charcoal under ash with mica	Manual, learned	Almost none	Traditional practice, long sessions
Electric heater with dial	Precise, repeatable	None	Learning a piece, comparing grades
Tealight sub-burner	Coarse	Low	Beginners, small chips
Direct coal or ember	Poor	Heavy	Cheap blends, not fine wood

An electric heater removes the two variables that ruin beginner sessions: heat and ash. It also invites impatience, because the dial makes it easy to raise the temperature when the aroma thins. That shortens the session and accelerates exhaustion. The wood rewards patience in a way that is easy to state and hard to practice.

Chips and Blocks

Direct answer: Most buyers meet agarwood as chips, and chips behave differently from the block they came from.

A chip has more surface per gram, so it releases faster and depletes sooner. That makes chips ideal for tasting and poor for long sessions. A piece the size of a grain of rice is enough for a first evaluation; a piece the size of a pea carries a longer sitting.

Cutting matters. A saw leaves dust, and dust burns rather than warms, producing smoke and a harsh note. A sharp blade that shaves leaves cleaner faces and less waste. The traditional description of 奇楠 as shaving into curls is both a handling property and a diagnostic.

Portioning is the discipline beginners skip. Buy a modest quantity, divide it into single-session portions, and keep them separate so a mistake with one does not consume the supply. A small glass vial per portion, labeled with date and seller description, is enough. Do not grind agarwood for a heater: powder is for sticks and cones, where a binder carries it, and on a plate it scorches almost immediately.

Oil, Perfume, and the Rest of the Wood

Direct answer: Much of the world’s agarwood becomes oil rather than incense, and that split explains what reaches the chip buyer.

Distillers use hydrodistillation or steam distillation, sometimes after soaking or fermenting the wood. Yield is low, the process is slow, and the oil is graded by scent rather than by the density scales used for solid material. Because yield is low, distillers buy wood that would be unremarkable on a heater: deposit-bearing but irregular, small, or ugly.

The market divides accordingly. The finest solid pieces become collector material and are heated. Middle grades are distilled. Lower grades are ground, blended, or treated. A buyer who understands the split reads prices more accurately, because a cheap chip offered at a premium is competing with what a distiller would pay for the same material.

Oud oil and heated agarwood are related experiences, not identical ones. The oil concentrates and transforms the volatile fraction; the heated wood presents it in sequence, with the woody substrate shaping the tail. Knowing one does not automatically mean knowing the other.

Wearables sit at another edge of the market. Beads often use material too small or irregular for display, and carving uses pieces with figure and enough size to hold a form. Skin oils and friction darken a bead over years; that patina is part of the object, not damage. Cleaning should be a dry wipe, because water and detergent strip the surface and can lift the deposit.

Agarwood in Japanese Practice

Direct answer: Japanese incense culture gave the wood a second vocabulary and a different mode of use, and both circulate internationally.

The wood is 沈香 there, jinkō, and the finest grade is 伽羅, kyara — the cognate of 奇楠. Classical practice warms a small piece on a mica plate over buried charcoal, the method called 隔火焚香, and treats the resulting aroma as an object of attention. The verb is 聞, to listen, and the session is 聞香, monkō.

Two consequences follow for a buyer in the West. Japanese grade names circulate widely and are often used loosely; a “kyara” listing in an English shop may describe a scent profile rather than a verified grade. The Japanese market also has house styles — the old incense houses of Kyoto have blended and sold these materials for centuries — and their lines are a useful reference for what a well-made stick of a given material smells like.

The practical lesson is about form. Japanese practice favors small pieces heated gently, which rewards complexity rather than volume. A chip that seems underwhelming when burned can be remarkable on a plate, and a buyer who only ever burns will misjudge a large part of the market.

In Arab Hospitality

Direct answer: The same wood appears in Gulf hospitality under a different set of words, and the usage explains another slice of demand.

Bakhoor is the general term for fragrant material burned in a mabkhara, the small censer passed among guests so clothing and hair take on the scent. Oud chips and oud oil both enter that practice, and the majlis — the sitting room where guests are received — is the setting. The aroma is expected to linger on fabric for hours, which puts a premium on a heavy, persistent tail rather than a delicate opening.

That preference shapes demand. Wood that performs poorly on a mica plate may still be prized for bakhoor, because the burning method and the social function differ. Consumers in that market often prefer a strong, resinous, slightly smoky profile, and the trade supplies it.

For a buyer, the lesson is that “quality” is not one scale. A piece judged by the standards of Japanese listening may be unremarkable in a majlis, and the reverse is equally true. Knowing which tradition a seller is speaking to explains much about how a piece is described and priced.

The Old Trade Routes

Direct answer: Agarwood moved along the same sea lanes as spices, and that history explains why so many place names attach to the material.

The overland and maritime routes connecting the South China Sea to the Mediterranean carried aromatics westward for centuries. Ports on the Malay coast, the straits between Sumatra and the peninsula, and the harbors of the Indian Ocean served as collection points where material from several forests was pooled, sorted, and renamed. By the time a parcel reached Alexandria or Venice, its origin had usually been replaced by a quality description, because a description sold better than a coordinate.

European traders entered the same network and added their own vocabulary. The words in older herbals and travel accounts — aloeswood, lign aloes, eaglewood, agalloch — are attempts to render an unfamiliar material into a familiar frame. None implies a species, and several were applied to more than one wood.

The pattern repeats in the modern market. A famous port becomes a style name; a style name becomes a price band; the price band attracts material from everywhere. That history is the best defense against a romantic origin story, because the story has been told for five hundred years and the material has always traveled further than its name.

What the Old Texts Say

Direct answer: Chinese formularies describe agarwood in a language of movement and warmth, and those phrases belong to the history of materia medica rather than to clinical evidence.

The 本草纲目 records the wood with phrases such as 行气止痛，温中降逆，补五脏 — roughly “move the qi, ease pain, warm the middle, support the organs.” This page quotes them because product copy repeats them. They are a traditional belief system, not findings from controlled trials, and no treatment claim is made here. The distinction matters commercially: a listing that markets the wood as medicine is making a regulatory claim in many markets, and the presence of such copy says something about the seller.

The Permit Trail

Direct answer: Wild agarwood has been harvested faster than it regenerates, and the response is a permit system that shapes the legal supply.

Several Aquilaria and Gyrinops species appear on the CITES appendices. Cross-border trade requires permits from the exporting country and a finding that the trade is not detrimental to wild populations. Listing status is checked at the CITES database.

Three practical effects follow. International shipments may need documentation a casual seller cannot supply. “Wild” material without paperwork is a legal risk that lands on the importer. And plantation material has become mainstream because it is easier to document and to sustain. Conservation is the reason the legal supply looks the way it does, and the reason provenance is a real question rather than an academic one.

What Moves the Price

Direct answer: Agarwood has no published price list, and any page that offers one is quoting a single grade or guessing. What can be described is the set of factors that move a quote.

Deposit fraction. The dominant variable. A piece that sinks trades in a different market from one that floats.

Grade category. 奇楠 sits apart, and within it color and behavior move the number further.

Formation and age. Old 熟结 material commands more than fresh cultivated wood of similar density, when either can be documented.

Provenance and legality. Documented, permit-supported material costs more because the buyer is paying for the absence of a legal problem.

Size and shape. Large intact pieces with good figure are worth more per gram than splinters, because they can be carved, displayed, or cut to order.

Seller tier. A specialist with a reputation prices differently from an anonymous marketplace listing. Part of the premium is recourse.

Compare quotes only within a grade and a form. A per-gram figure for chips and one for a sink-grade block are not the same number, and treating them as comparable is how buyers talk themselves into a bargain that is not one.

A Sensible Purchase

Direct answer: Put cheap checks first and expensive commitments last.

1. Decide the purpose. Heating, carving, display, and distillation are four different purchases with different grade requirements.
2. Fix budget and form. Chips for a heater, a small block for handling, a larger piece for display.
3. Ask for species, origin, and category in writing. Vague answers are information.
4. Request photographs of both faces with a scale. One flattering face is not a description.
5. Buy a small sample. Heat it, smell it over twenty minutes, and compare it with a reference if one exists.
6. Escalate only after the sample passes. The second purchase is where trust is built.
7. Keep the paperwork. Species, origin, permits, and the seller’s description, stored with the piece.

The natural vs synthetic page is useful background for the substitution problem, since the same logic applies to fragrance compounds across the trade.

Storage and Handling

Direct answer: Agarwood is stable, and most damage comes from handling rather than time.

Keep pieces out of sunlight, away from heat, and away from anything strongly scented. Deposit-rich wood absorbs odors from its surroundings, and a piece stored beside a scented candle will carry that smell. A wooden box or a sealed glass jar works; plastic is acceptable only when the piece is fully dry and the bag clean.

Handle with tweezers or clean fingers, and avoid touching the face you intend to heat, because skin oil oxidizes and turns rancid on the surface. Do not wash agarwood. Water raises the grain, can mobilize the deposit, and encourages mold in softer tissue. Do not refrigerate or freeze; condensation cycles do more harm than room temperature. If a piece arrives damp, let it dry slowly in shade and moving air before sealing it away.

Labels, Photos, Certificates

Direct answer: A listing is a sales document, and its structure reveals what the seller knows.

Look for fields a knowledgeable seller fills without prompting: species, country or region, wild or cultivated, form, and weight. A listing with a poetic description and no species is selling atmosphere rather than material.

Look at photographs for scale and for both faces. A hand, ruler, or coin gives size; a single face gives the best angle. Warm light flatters color, and heavy contrast hides pale inclusions. A seller who shows the pale side is showing something a faker would hide.

Read the grade claim carefully. “Sinking” is a test result that can be checked. “Super” and “king” are adjectives. “Wild” is a category that requires paperwork. “Kyara-grade” is a comparison that means little without a reference.

Certificates need the same scrutiny. A CITES permit proves a shipment was declared and approved for export; it does not prove the contents match the invoice and does not grade the wood. A laboratory report may identify species from a sample, but its value depends on whether the sample came from the piece you are buying, whether the lab is identifiable, and whether the report covers a shipment or a single object. A seller’s own certificate proves the seller can print a certificate. The hierarchy is legality first, independent species identification second, everything else as support.

Learning by Blind Tests

Direct answer: The fastest way to learn agarwood is to remove the labels.

Take three known but different pieces, code them, and have someone present them in random order. Smell each on the same heater, at the same temperature, with a minute between. Write one line per piece before checking the code. Repeat across sessions, then swap one piece out.

The exercise teaches two things reading cannot. Smell memory is weak and needs an anchor, which the written line provides. Expectation dominates early judgment, which is why blind presentation is the only way to learn what you actually notice.

A pair test is a useful variation: two pieces, one variable. Same region different grade, same grade different region, or one wood at two temperatures. A single variable is easier to detect, and detection builds vocabulary. Keep the notes; after a few months they become a reference no listing can replace.

Three Pieces on the Table

Direct answer: Abstract rules are hard to use, so here are three pieces of the kind a first buyer meets.

Piece A is a small block, dark on one face and pale on the other, heavier than its size suggests. The seller calls it sinking grade. On the plate it opens sharply, holds a sweet middle for ten minutes, then goes thin. The pale face is a third of the block. Reading: probably genuine, probably mid-grade, certainly not uniform. The sink test may have been run on the dark end only.

Piece B is a set of chips, uniformly dark, faintly glossy, and strongly aromatic in the bag. On the plate the smell arrives immediately and does not change; after eight minutes it is gone. The chips feel slightly slick. Reading: treated. The gloss and the flat development are the tells, and rapid exhaustion is the consequence.

Piece C is a light-colored chip with visible dark veins, no smell at room temperature, and a modest price. On the plate it stays quiet for two minutes, then opens into something resinous and slightly sour, holds for twenty, and ends woody. Reading: ordinary agarwood, honestly described, and the best of the three for learning because it behaves the way the material is supposed to behave.

The exercise is worth repeating with real pieces. The point is not to memorize answers but to notice that the diagnostic information arrives in the first minutes and on the surface, not in the description. A buyer who learns to look at the pale face, feel the gloss, and wait through the quiet opening avoids most of the market’s traps without learning a single grade name.

The Author’s View

Position: A new buyer’s best skill is spotting a seller who answers a species question without hesitation.

Grading vocabulary can be memorized and recited. A documented chain, a willingness to sell a sample, and a straight answer on cultivation cannot be faked cheaply, and they predict the tenth purchase better than the first description. This is a buying heuristic, not a guarantee that paperwork equals quality; a well-papered piece can still disappoint on the plate. That boundary matters, because it keeps the advice from turning into a promise.

This is the author’s editorial view, based on trade practice rather than a controlled study.

FAQ

Q: What is agarwood incense made of?

The raw material is Aquilaria heartwood that has been invaded by a dark deposit after injury, usually warmed rather than ignited. Chips are the raw form. Sticks and cones are manufactured: the wood is milled, mixed with a binder and often other aromatics, formed, and dried. In a stick, the agarwood fraction may be small, so the stick is a delivery system for a blend rather than a sample of one tree.

Q: Why does agarwood cost so much?

Because supply is a by-product of damage. The deposit accumulates slowly, the affected part of a trunk is small, and wild harvest is restricted by international agreement. Add the cost of verifying what you are buying, and the price reflects scarcity plus the expense of trust. The grade spread is wide, which is the opening that treatment and substitution exploit.

Q: How can I tell a real piece from a fake?

Use several observations rather than one decisive test. A cut face should show dark veins wandering through pale fiber. Gentle warmth should produce a smell that develops rather than announces itself. The surface should feel dry. Smoke, if any, should be light. Then the decisive question: will the seller put species, origin, form, and weight in writing?

Q: How does oud relate to agarwood?

The word “oud” covers the wood in Arabic usage and, by extension, the oil distilled from it and the perfumes built on that oil. The answer depends on which of the three a listing means. Ask whether the item is wood, distillate, or fragrance, and ask the species for the first two.

Q: What makes the apex grade different?

Structure. Ordinary material is timber with deposit channels; the apex grade is deposit that has softened the fiber, so it shaves into curls, deforms under pressure, and smells before it is warmed. The distinction is physical, which is why handling tells you something before the nose gets a chance.

Q: Why does a chip smell weaker after a year?

Because the light fraction that carries the opening evaporates slowly even in storage. Warmth, light, and exposure to air accelerate the loss, and a piece kept beside a scent source picks up foreign odors at the same time. The wood is not decaying in the way food does; it is losing the most volatile part of what you paid for. Store it dark, dry, and sealed.

Sources

• Flora of China — the genus description and species boundaries.
• Naef’s review of agarwood volatiles in Flavour and Fragrance Journal — DOI — the chemistry behind the staged release.
• CITES database — current trade listing for Aquilaria.
• 本草纲目 — read as a formulary, quoted as history — text.
• 香乘, Ming — grade language and the substitution problem — text.
• Trade literature on 奇楠 for the descriptive categories and their disputes.

Related Resources

• Sandalwood: a different genus and a different kind of scent.
• Grading guide: the vocabulary in more detail.
• Authentication database: reference material for the checks above.
• Agarwood against frankincense: wood judged against resin.
• Chinese incense and the scent guide: the tradition behind the grading and the wood’s place among the families.

Natural next step: if you are buying your first piece, read the grading guide alongside the authentication database, then decide whether you want chips for a heater or a piece to handle.

Summary

• Agarwood is a wound response in Aquilaria, not a species.
• Buoyancy tracks conversion and is easy to engineer.
• The apex grade is a structure, and its name is the most abused in the market.
• Warming releases scent in phases; flame destroys the phase worth paying for.
• The fakes add surface, so grain beats gloss; paperwork and a sample beat any bench trick.