The Latest Detailed Guide to Agarwood Producing Areas and Formation Process

Agarwood is the resin-containing wood of Aquilaria sinensis, a plant of the Thymelaeaceae family. It is distributed in Guangdong, Hainan, Guangxi, Fujian and other places, and has the effects of promoting qi circulation and relieving pain, warming the middle and stopping vomiting, and helping the kidney to grasp qi and relieve asthma. It is often used for chest and abdominal distension and pain, stomach cold vomiting and hiccups, kidney deficiency with qi counterflow and rapid breathing, and other conditions. Let us take a look together below at the producing areas and formation process of agarwood!

The Producing Areas of Agarwood

The main producing areas of agarwood are Guangdong, Hainan, Guangxi, Fujian and other places. It likes to grow in low-altitude mountainous areas, hills, and open sparse forests on roadsides in sunny spots.

The Variety Classification of Agarwood

1. Ripe formation: After the tree dies, the roots and trunk fall to the ground or sink into the soil. Exposed to wind and rain, over the years they slowly decompose and contract, ultimately leaving behind a coagulated substance composed mainly of oily resin components. As recorded in the Compendium of Materia Medica, “its aged wood, with the outer bark long decayed over the years, while the heartwood and branch nodes remain intact, hard, black and sinking in water, is agarwood”.

2. Living formation: The fragrant resin formed while the tree is still alive. After external forces such as axe and knife cuts or the gnawing of snakes, insects and animals cause relatively deep wounds, the fragrant tree secretes resin for self-protection, thereby forming agarwood near the wound.

3. Shedding: Agarwood formed again after branches and trunks have decayed and fallen.

4. Insect leakage: Agarwood formed due to damage to the tree by tree borers, bacteria and the like.

The Formation Process of Agarwood

Agarwood is actually a metamorphic product of the tree sap of plants from four specific families and genera: Burseraceae, Lauraceae, Thymelaeaceae, and Euphorbiaceae. For the fragrance-forming effect to occur, the following conditions must be met.

1. The correct tree species: It must be a plant from one of the four specific families and genera: Burseraceae, Lauraceae, Thymelaeaceae, and Euphorbiaceae.

2. Injury is a necessary condition for fragrance formation: In nature, injury to the tree body is a low-probability event. The main causes of injury include insect damage, collisions from climbing animals, mudslides, wind and rain, and so on. Once an agarwood tree is injured by external forces, the agarwood tree, as a living organism, immediately produces a stress response and secretes a large amount of sap.

3. Fungal invasion is the key link in fragrance formation: During the process of the injured tree body healing, if conditions such as temperature and humidity in the surrounding environment are suitable, and suitable fungi happen to exist around the wound, the fungal community will invade the tree body through the epidermal wound of the agarwood tree, and rapidly use the nutrient factors in the sap as a culture medium for a complex biological reaction process. Under anaerobic conditions, the fungi produce many metabolites, and these metabolites contain large amounts of new aromatic substances that the agarwood tree originally did not have, and these aromatic substances are the source of agarwood's fragrance. At this time, coagulation factors within the agarwood tree are produced in large quantities, and gradually coagulate the sap in some vessels within the infected area, thereby resisting further invasion by fungi. At this point, although the agarwood tree already has aromatic substances, their quantity is extremely small, they are not yet formed, and they cannot yet become agarwood.

4. The continuation and spread of infection: Fungal infection and metabolism do not remain only at the wound site, but also further invade along the tree's nutrient channels. This is what we usually call the infection spread process. When various conditions are met, within the agarwood tree, the fungi continuously expand the infection, continuously interact with various factors in the tree body, continuously produce aromatic substances, and are continuously coagulated by the tree's coagulation factors in the vessels. This process of infection, reaction, production of aromatic substances, coagulation, and then further spread of infection repeats cyclically. This cyclical repetition is called the continuous infection stage. This stage is the guarantee of continuous fragrance formation and ultimately the formation of block agarwood.

5. Agarwood formation: Within the agarwood tree body, the newly generated fragrance-producing substances, the fungal bodies themselves, other non-fragrance-producing fungal metabolites, fungal death residues, agarwood tree tissue residues, and some substances in the sap are, under the action of the agarwood tree's coagulation factors, coagulated and solidified together with the tree's wood fibers. At this point, there appears in the agarwood tree a kind of coagulated organic compound that is agarwood, and this process of “tree injury, fungal infection, infection spread, tree anti-infection, fungal metabolism, production of aromatic substances, coagulation, and formation of a mixture together with wood fibers” is the fragrance-forming process of agarwood.