Thymelaeaceae
Aquilaria malaccensis
Agarwood · Oud · Gaharu · Aloeswood
- Part used
- woodresin
- Native range
- Southeast Asia — Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh
- Morphology
- An evergreen tree to forty metres. The valuable material is not the wood but a dark aromatic resin the tree produces only in response to fungal infection of the heartwood — healthy trees contain none.
What is in it
Evidence
Essentially no controlled clinical evidence. Its value is overwhelmingly as incense and perfume rather than as medicine.
Safety
Little characterised. Not a common medicinal preparation outside its traditional contexts.
Regulatory: CITES Appendix II since 1995. Trade in wild-harvested material is restricted.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Traded for at least two thousand years as incense and medicine across Asia and the Middle East, and named in Sanskrit, Chinese, Arabic and biblical sources. Central to Islamic, Buddhist and Hindu ritual use.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Agarwood is the most valuable wood in the world by weight — the best grades reach tens of thousands of dollars a kilogram — and it exists only because the tree gets sick.
Healthy Aquilaria heartwood is pale, light and worthless. When the tree is wounded and infected by particular fungi, it responds by laying down a dark aromatic resin, and that resin is oud. There is no way to tell from outside whether a given tree has any, so harvesters have historically felled trees to find out.
The result is predictable: a species listed as Critically Endangered, on CITES Appendix II since 1995, with wild populations across Southeast Asia stripped. Inoculated plantations now exist and produce usable material, which is the only real answer — but wild agarwood still commands a premium, which keeps the pressure exactly where it has always been.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.