When you think of expensive items, diamonds, jewels and gold come into your mind. But what if I told you there’s a rare type of wood that is more precious that any of the items listed above?
Kynam or ‘kyara’ in Japanese is a type of agarwood that is extremely rare and used in perfume and incense industries due to its strong fragrance. After ‘oud’, it is the most sought out fragrance albeit a lot harder to obtain. A single gram of kynam can be sold for well over $10,000 which puts it on the top of the list of the world’s most expensive wood and natural materials in general.
Kynam comes in a lot of different types out of which agarwood is the most expensive and the best kind. Its other names include aloeswood, eaglewood or simply oud. For more than thousands of years, agarwood has been an important part of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arab and Southeast-Asian cultures but only until recently has its demand as well as price risen as the most expensive wood.
Agarwood is created by the dark resin produced by the aquilaria tree which is a rare occurrence itself and depends upon certain conditions. While it was previously believed that agarwood was only produced when the Aquilaria tree was harmed by getting struck by lightning, invaded by ants or damaged by animals, it was later found out that it was produced due to an infection of a certain type of mold present in the wood.
The mold known as Phialophora parasitic is responsible for the creation of agar, aloes or oud in the heartwood of Aquilaria trees. People have now learnt to infect the tree with the said mold manually to create the precious agarwood which is then used as an essence for high-quality and expensive perfumes. There are now different plantations in Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam that specialize in the production of oud but wild Aquilaria trees are still a rare sight all over Asia.
