Zhipu Xiangtang is committed to reviving China's ancient incense culture, and the owner of the church, Yin Hai, has written many articles on the popularization of incense culture in recent years.
Recently, many incense friends have consulted about the classification of agarwood and the identification of true and false agarwood. Before, Yin Hai teacher also wrote a lot of agarwood popularity articles, but also involved in this aspect of the problem, today specifically on the agarwood entry must understand the problem, to give you an answer to the incense friends, but also to the agarwood beginner players some suggestions.
These suggestions are as simple and practical as possible, so that incense friends who are just getting started with agarwood can understand some of the basic knowledge of agarwood, understand the authenticity, quality, artificial wildness and origin of agarwood.
1. What is agarwood?
Agarwood is a substance that is neither woody nor resinous after a tree of the Family Ofariaceae is injured and secreted after being injured by a fungus.
Second, how to judge the quality of agarwood?
The quality of agarwood is related to the length of its incense time. In general, the darker the color, the higher the oil content, the higher the quality, and in general, the oil content exceeds 25%, which can reach the level of submerged water. (However, grease is not the only criterion for judging the quality of agarwood, click to read "Agarwood must sink into water?" ”）。
The oil content of agarwood can be fully seen by the naked eye without going through the instrument. The uninjured agarwood tree is only the mother of agarwood, not agarwood, and there are also agarwood trees that do not bear incense in the industry called "agarwood wood".
In fact, there is no such thing as a wood called "agarwood", agarwood is a dry uncarred or very small amount of wood in trees such as white wood or agarwood trees of the Ruixiang family, which is used in many parts of the world to burn incense, extract spices, add to wine, or directly carve into ornaments, which has been a very valuable wood since ancient times, and is also one of the best raw materials for crafts.
Third, the origin (place of origin) of agarwood is indeed very important, but Yinhai's advice to beginner incense friends, do not set such a high goal for yourself, get a piece of agarwood to determine its place of origin.
Identifying the origin of agarwood is a long-term accumulation process, not only the place of origin determines the taste, that is, the same product, the incense on different agarwood trees, and even on the same tree, because of its incense part, incense method, incense time and other factors, the taste of incense will be different. The ancients had a saying that hainan agarwood "one wood five spices" tasted different,
Rough estimates, there are a total of two major series in the world, the Hoi An and Sin Chau series, and twenty-three agarwood varieties, which is impossible for the vast majority of merchants, including so-called experts, to fully understand. Therefore, Yinhai recommends that you do not dwell too much on gao to understand these problems, and focus on the density, weight, color shade and its fragrance of agarwood. The main value of agarwood lies in its fragrance, good taste, and what you like is good agarwood.
Fourth, agarwood has a variety of professional terms: such as soil sinking, water sinking, living sinking, raw knots, mature knots, falling off, upside down, baotou plate head, insect leakage, etc., single Hainan incense in the Song Dynasty has "cliff incense twelve-shaped", now more nouns, most of the agarwood is named in the form of incense and incense, as an ordinary player, how does agarwood come from, what it looks like, what it is called is not important, professionals ponder to reflect their own knowledge, ordinary consumers do not have to understand these, everyone has a blind spot of knowledge, know it as knowledge, Admit what you don't understand, don't be ashamed.
Fifth, about Chess Nan.
In texture, the difference between chess and agarwood is soft, most of the agarwood texture is hard, it is very laborious to cut with a knife, and chess nan is not the same, cutting chess nan is like cutting leather, it will curl when cutting thin slices, a bit like the feeling of wood chips curling when cutting pencils, but sometimes it is placed for a long time, and its skin will sometimes be hard.
In terms of taste, the general agarwood has no taste at room temperature, but the chess nan has a very strong fragrance when it is not lit, and when it is used in the incense burner, there will be several stages of change, and the good chess nan will have as many as 5 or 6 aroma changes, and not only the three stages of good agarwood (first incense, original incense, tail incense). Moreover, the aroma of each stage is very elegant and pleasant, the aroma is long, and many of the first incense of Chess Nan will have a very cool and channeling taste, which is directly through the brain and plays a very good role in opening up the qi.
There is also Chess Nan can continue to produce incense, the general agarwood on the electric incense burner smoked for more than ten minutes, the taste will become lighter, chess Nan's incense will be more durable, there are incense friends to do an experiment as long as the temperature control is appropriate, chess Nan's incense can last for about a week.
In terms of taste, in addition to the obvious aromatic sense, Qi Nan also has a feeling of sticky teeth, and when contacted with the tip of the tongue, there will be spicy, hemp, sweet, bitter, sour and other tastes, and there is a strong sense of qi rushing straight to the back of the head.
In terms of price, the general chess nan needs thousands of pieces per gram, and the good ones are even tens of thousands of pieces. Therefore, but from the price point of view, there are many hundreds to thousands of pieces of a string of hand strings on the market, which cannot be the texture of Chess Nan, beginners should be careful.
In terms of plant properties, Qinan is different from agarwood, it is caused by different fungi, the fungus infecting Qinan is a low-grade bacteria, and the fungus infecting agarwood is a higher bacterium.
The top-notch Qinan, qing smell and electric incense burner taste good, but the burning may not smell good. The temperature of the electric incense burner generally starts from 80 degrees, while the agarwood is more suitable from 100-120 degrees.
6. About the difference between wild and artificially grown agarwood?
First of all, pure wild agarwood is of course the best, but this incense is getting less and less, and touching is fate.
Regarding artificial planting, I personally think that we must look at the problem from a dialectical perspective, of course, this is to put aside the way of hanging chemical hanging bottles to promote the incense of agarwood trees, and Zhipu Xiangtang is resolutely resisting that chemical incense method.
If it is only an artificial simulation of the incense process of agarwood, through artificial intervention, the evergreen trees of the genus Agarwood of the Family Ruixiang family undergo natural or man-made injuries to form incense, and there is no essential difference between artificial and wild incense principles.
From this point of view, it is not necessarily good for wild agarwood, and it is necessary for artificial cultivation to be bad. Using manual intervention, as long as the incense is long, the oil content is high, and the color is dark, the quality of wild incense is higher than that of wild incense with shorter incense time and small density.
7. Why is the price difference between agarwood in the same production area so large?
For example, the incense in Nha Trang, Vietnam, due to the time of incense, the density of oil and fat, including the environment in which the agarwood tree grows, will lead to different quality of incense and different prices. In general, the price of wild agarwood, especially the price of old materials, is relatively high. For example, the price of the top sinking grade agarwood, Qinan, etc. is thousands or even tens of thousands of yuan per gram.
Eighth, I heard that the price of agarwood is very high, can we ordinary people afford to use it?
It is true that the price of agarwood is high, but there is a common misunderstanding here. The high price of agarwood refers to hundreds of years, or even hundreds of years of wild submerged water old materials, or Qinan, etc., and the current market public auction price of these materials has indeed reached thousands of dollars per gram, or even tens of thousands of yuan.
In general, top-level agarwood is generally used to make crafts such as carvings. Moreover, we make incense every day, using agarwood of the water level to make incense, which has a high oil content and is not easy to ignite. The price of zhipu xiangtang pure natural agarwood ranges from tens, hundreds, to more than a thousand. For daily use, choose a suitable price of agarwood on it.