The history of agarwood trade

Agarwood has been moving along trade routes for roughly two thousand years, connecting forests in South and Southeast Asia to courts, markets and ports thousands of kilometres away. This guide draws on the documented historical record, much of it summarised in a 2018 peer-reviewed review in the journal Economic Botany, rather than repeating the looser claims that circulate in popular writing.

One wood, many names

One of the clearest signs of agarwood's long reach is the trail of names it left behind. The Sanskrit agaru or aguru passed into Pali, into Greek as agallochon, and into Hebrew as ahalim. Malay traders called it gaharu. Chinese sources call it chénxiāng, "sinking fragrance," and Japanese uses the same characters, read jinkō. Portuguese traders called it pau d'aguila, which fed into the older English name "eaglewood."

The Arabic name stands apart. ʿŪd is an Arabic word meaning "wood," and it is the source of the modern English "oud." It is not derived from the Sanskrit name, even though both now refer to the same material. The hadith use an older Arabic word, al-uluwwa, covered in agarwood in Islam.

Ancient India and the Mediterranean

References to aguru appear in early Indian literature, including the Mahābhārata, although which of the earliest Vedic passages refer specifically to agarwood is debated. By the late centuries BCE the trade was significant enough to be formally taxed. The Arthashastra, the Indian treatise on statecraft traditionally dated to the Mauryan period, sets out a tax on agarwood, an unusually concrete sign that it was already a valuable commodity moving through organised markets.

Knowledge of agarwood reached the Mediterranean world by the early centuries CE. The Greek physician Dioscorides described it in his De Materia Medica in the first century CE, part of a wider body of evidence for South Asian aromatics entering the Greco-Roman world through Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade.

Rome, Arabia and the incense routes

By the early centuries CE, agarwood was moving through an established network of overland and maritime incense routes run at various points by intermediary traders, including the Nabataeans in Arabia. Rome's annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE gave it more direct access to Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, and aloeswood appears among the goods subject to Roman customs duty at Alexandria in a list preserved in Justinian's Digest.

One Chinese record shows how far agarwood products travelled. In 284 CE, envoys from Da Qin, the Chinese name for the Roman world, are recorded presenting the Jin court with 30,000 rolls of "honey-fragrance paper," a paper said to be made from the bark of agarwood trees. Whatever the precise accuracy of the figure, it signals how widely agarwood was known and how seriously it was treated as a diplomatic gift.

Tribute and trade: agarwood's rise in China

Chinese sources document agarwood arriving from India and Southeast Asia by the third and fourth centuries CE, and early Chinese writing already describes a form of deliberate induction: cutting into a tree and returning later to find the wood changed inside. That is an early awareness of the same wound-and-resin process described in how agarwood resin forms.

Agarwood's importance in China grew through the Tang dynasty, driven in large part by Buddhist demand, and tributary and commercial trade continued to draw it from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Malay world and Indonesia through the Tang and Song dynasties. Physical evidence survives directly: incense sealed in the Famen Temple crypt in 874 CE and analysed in a 2022 study includes agarwood, covered in agarwood in Chinese culture. Centuries later, Marco Polo recorded aloeswood as plentiful in Champa, in what is now central and southern Vietnam.

The Islamic world and the Indian Ocean trade

Agarwood was firmly established in the trade and material culture of the medieval Islamic world. Hadith record the Prophet Muhammad's companions fumigating with aloeswood, and burning oud became closely tied to hospitality and religious occasions, covered in agarwood in Islam. Accounts of elite consumption at the Abbasid court in Baghdad describe large stores of aloeswood among the possessions of caliphs.

Arab merchants and geographers documented the maritime trade directly. An account of voyages to India and China attributed to the merchant Sulayman al-Tajir, dating from the mid ninth century, is among the earliest surviving Arabic descriptions of the sea route from the Persian Gulf to China through the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca. By the time the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta crossed maritime Southeast Asia in the fourteenth century, Arab, Indian and Southeast Asian traders had been moving agarwood along broadly the same sea routes for centuries.

The early modern trade

European travellers continued to record the trade as contact with South and Southeast Asia expanded, describing agarwood from Java, Sumatra, Malacca and Cambodia moving through Indian Ocean ports. In Mughal India, the late sixteenth century Ain-i-Akbari describes the use of aloeswood among the empire's perfumes.

By the nineteenth century, Assam had become a significant source within British India, with agarwood shipped through Calcutta to markets in the Middle East and beyond. Assam still holds that role today in a very different, largely plantation based form, covered in agarwood in Hindu tradition and Indian agarwood.

The CITES turning point

Centuries of rising demand eventually caught up with wild Aquilaria populations. In 1994, at the ninth CITES Conference of the Parties, a proposal from India to list Aquilaria malaccensis in Appendix II was adopted, taking effect in February 1995. It was the first time an agarwood species came under binding international trade controls. At the 2004 conference, a proposal from Indonesia extended the listing to every species of Aquilaria and Gyrinops. What the listing requires today is covered in agarwood and CITES explained.