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 and archaeological record, most thoroughly summarised in a 2018 peer-reviewed history published in the journal Economic Botany, to trace how that trade actually developed, region by region, rather than repeating the looser claims that circulate in popular writing about the subject.

One Wood, Many Names

One of the clearest pieces of evidence for agarwood's long reach is the wood's own name, which shifted and travelled with the trade itself. The root is generally traced to the Sanskrit agāru or aguru, meaning roughly "non-floating wood," referring to the way resin-dense agarwood sinks rather than floats, a property covered in our guide to how agarwood resin forms. From Sanskrit, the name moved into Pali as agalu, into Greek as agallochum, into Hebrew as ahalim or aḥāloth, and into Arabic as al-ʿūd, simply "the wood," the direct source of the modern English "oud." Malay traders called it găharu, Chinese sources came to call it chénxiāng, "sinking incense," and Japan adopted jinkō, the same characters read differently, as covered in our guides to agarwood in Chinese culture and agarwood in Japanese culture. Portuguese traders later rendered it as aguila, which fed into the older English name "eaglewood," a term still occasionally used today.

The Earliest Evidence: Vedic India and the Ancient World

The earliest textual references to aguru appear in early Vedic literature, generally dated to roughly 1500 to 1000 BCE, alongside later references in the Mahābhārata. By the fourth century BCE, the trade was significant enough to be formally regulated: the Arthashastra, a Mauryan Empire era treatise on statecraft compiled around 320 BCE, sets out a tax on agarwood of between one tenth and one fifteenth of its sale price, an unusually concrete piece of evidence that agarwood was already a recognised, valuable commodity moving through organised markets in ancient India.

Knowledge of agarwood reached the Mediterranean world by the early centuries CE. The Greek physician Dioscorides described its medical uses in his Materia Medica around 65 CE, and earlier Greek voyages to India, including those of the navigator Eudoxus of Cyzicus around 120 to 110 BCE, are part of the documented contact that brought South Asian aromatics into the Greco-Roman world.

Rome, Arabia, and the Incense Routes

By the early centuries CE, agarwood was moving through an established network of overland and maritime incense routes controlled at various points by intermediary traders, including the Nabateans, who controlled significant sections of the Arabian incense trade from roughly 25 BCE into the fourth or fifth century CE. Rome's annexation of Egypt in 30 BCE gave it more direct access to Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade, and Roman customs authorities are documented taxing aloeswood entering through Alexandria, a practice recorded in the sixth century CE legal compilation known as Justinian's Digest.

The scale some of this trade reached is suggested by a striking, specific record: in 284 CE, a Roman envoy is recorded presenting the Chinese emperor with a gift of 30,000 rolls of fine agarwood, a tribute figure that, whatever its precise accuracy, signals just how far agarwood had already travelled and how seriously it was treated as a diplomatic commodity centuries before the trade routes most people associate with it had fully matured.

Tribute and Trade: Agarwood's Rise in China

Chinese textual sources document agarwood imports from India and Southeast Asia by the third and fourth centuries CE, and Chinese sources from around 300 CE already describe a recognisably deliberate induction process: cutting into a tree and observing the wood change colour internally within about a year, an early documented awareness of the same wounding-and-resin-response process described in modern research on how agarwood resin forms.

Agarwood's importance in China grew substantially through the Tang dynasty, driven in large part by Buddhist religious demand. The kingdom of Linyi, in what is now southern Vietnam, is documented sending agarwood to the Tang court as tribute through envoys recorded in 734 and 749 CE, part of a broader tributary and commercial system that continued drawing agarwood from Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia into China through the Tang and Song dynasties. Physical evidence from this period survives directly: incense recovered from the Famen Temple's ninth century crypt, analysed and published in 2022, confirmed agarwood among the aromatics sealed there in 874 CE, a find covered in full in our guide to agarwood in Chinese culture. Centuries later, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo recorded agarwood as abundant in both Champa, in what is now southern Vietnam, and in parts of eastern Indonesia, evidence that the same source regions remained significant well into the late medieval period.

The Islamic World and the Indian Ocean Trade

Agarwood, generally referred to as al-ʿūd, was firmly established in the medieval Islamic world's trade and material culture. Hadith literature, the recorded traditions attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, references al-ʿūd al-hindī, Indian agarwood, used for fumigation, reflecting how thoroughly it had been absorbed into early Islamic daily and ritual life. The scale of elite consumption is suggested by the recorded inventory taken after the death of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid in 809 CE, which is said to have included around 1,000 baskets of aloeswood.

Arab merchants and geographers documented this trade directly. Sulayman al-Tajir's account of journeys to India and China, compiled around 851 CE, is among the earliest surviving Arabic descriptions of the long maritime route connecting the Persian Gulf to East Asia through the Indian Ocean and the Strait of Malacca. Centuries later, the Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta travelled this same general network during his journeys through maritime Southeast Asia in the 1340s, by which point Arab, Indian, and Southeast Asian traders had been moving agarwood along broadly the same sea routes for close to a millennium.

Colonial Trade Through the Early Modern Market

European travellers continued documenting the trade as colonial-era contact with South and Southeast Asia expanded. The German traveller Johan Albrecht von Mandelslo, writing in the 1630s, recorded agarwood sourced from Java, Malacca, Sumatra, and Cambodia moving through Indian Ocean trade networks, alongside parallel references to agarwood use in Mughal India recorded in the sixteenth century Ain-i-Akbari.

By the nineteenth century, Assam had become a significant extraction centre within British India, with agarwood exported via Calcutta to markets in Turkey, Arabia, Persia, and Europe, a regional role that, as covered in our guide to agarwood in Hindu tradition, Assam still holds in a very different, plantation-driven form today. By the early twentieth century, China had also become a major export destination for Indian agarwood, reinforcing demand patterns that had already been in place, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years.

1995: The CITES Turning Point

Centuries of expanding demand eventually caught up with wild Aquilaria populations. In 1994, India submitted a formal proposal to list Aquilaria malaccensis under Appendix II of CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, a proposal accepted at the same year's Conference of the Parties and taking legal effect on 16 February 1995. It marked the first time an agarwood-producing species had been placed under binding international trade controls, a regulatory turning point that reshaped the modern industry toward plantation cultivation and is covered in full, including what the listing actually requires of buyers and sellers today, in our dedicated guide to agarwood and CITES.