Ten Years of Agarwood, Chapter One: The Broken Incense

In the autumn of 2008, the typhoon came late to Dongguan.

Shen Zhiyan was woken by a sharp, sandalwood-like scent. Not sandalwood—agarwood. The old Hainan huanghuali incense box in his father's study lay open, a dark brown piece of wood resting on black velvet, like a bone that had been split apart.

He remembered where this piece came from. At seven, he had followed his father up Jianfengling; at the end of the mountain path stood an agarwood tree three men could barely encircle, half its trunk scorched black by lightning, gaping open. His father said it was "broken incense"—where lightning fire splits the tree, the tree itself bleeds resin to heal, and the deeper the wound, the thicker the incense formed.

"Trees are like people," his father had said, crouching in the mud, tapping the charred cross-section lightly with the back of a machete. "Without injury, no memory; without resin formation, no character."

Now his father lay in a Guangzhou hospital room, tubes in his body, unable to say those words.

The Shen family incense shop stood in an old arcade building in Liwan, with a glass counter, the abacus his grandfather had left behind, and a television flickering with snow. Shen Zhiyan had returned from studying business abroad, originally planning to join a fund company in Shenzhen; it was his mother who called late at night and dragged him back: "Your father is failing. Someone has to take over this business."

He had never believed in incense.

During his years abroad, he had only received small wooden boxes from his father at Christmas, a few grams of chips inside, with the instruction to "burn a little when studying tires you, to settle the mind." He found the smell harsh and mostly gave them away. Until this moment, when he pinched the broken piece and brought it to his nose—it was not harsh as he had imagined, but cool, like moss after rain, with a hint of sweetness hidden in the base notes that could only be caught by holding one's breath.

A soft sound came from downstairs. An old man in a grey cloth shirt pushed the door open, slightly hunched, a brass scale clutched in his hand.

"Uncle Zhou." Shen Zhiyan recognized him. Uncle Zhou had been with the Shen family for thirty years, running Hainan in his early days to source incense, and now merely watched the counter in the shop.

Uncle Zhou offered no pleasantries. He walked straight behind the counter, set the brass scale on the velvet, and stared at the broken piece for a long while.

"Left by the boss?" he asked.

"Yes."

"This piece is wild." Uncle Zhou scraped the cross-section with his fingernail; crumbs fell into his palm, and he held them under the lamp. "Look at these oil lines—they grew inward layer by layer along the wound, not painted on from outside. Ninety percent of the 'agarwood' on the market looks oily on the surface, but scrape it open and it's white inside—that's oil-soaked white wood."

Shen Zhiyan was taken aback. "Oil-soaked?"

"More of it these past two years." Uncle Zhou blew the crumbs away. "People soak ordinary Aquilaria sinensis in essential oil, press it, and it looks black and heavy, smells fragrant too—but that fragrance is dead incense; it smokes acridly when burned. Truly good incense is what the tree itself has endured."

When he said the word "endured," Shen Zhiyan suddenly recalled his father's words—without injury, no resin formation.

That evening, his mother called to say his father's condition had stabilized somewhat. Shen Zhiyan hung up and sat for a long time in the empty arcade. The moisture from the Pearl River drifted up outside, and a thin mist condensed on the glass. For the first time he looked carefully at this shop: in the old photographs on the wall, his young father stood before the rainforest with a bamboo basket on his back; in the corner of the counter lay a stack of yellowed ledgers recording that in the 1990s a gram of qinan could buy half a month's meals.

He opened his computer and searched "agarwood." The first news item made him frown—in a livestream, a host held up a string of "sinking grade agarwood bracelets," priced at 9.9 yuan with free shipping, while comments scrolled "ordered."

Uncle Zhou, unnoticed, stood behind him and clicked his tongue. "Nine point nine? An agarwood tree takes decades to grow and decades more for resin formation—does he think it's cabbage?"

Shen Zhiyan closed the page and tapped his knuckles on the desk.

He suddenly felt that what his father had left him was not a shop but a fracture—like that lightning-struck agarwood tree, waiting for him to bleed resin and form incense himself.

Outside, the typhoon finally made landfall, rain hammering the arcade's tin awning with a crackle. He smelled the lingering cool sweetness on his fingers and, for the first time, felt this scent was worth someone taking seriously.

*（End of Chapter One）*

> Author's Note · What You'll Understand After Reading This: Agarwood is not fragrant throughout the whole tree; rather, trees of the Aquilaria genus in the Thymelaeaceae family (such as Hainan Aquilaria sinensis) secrete resin to heal themselves after injury—from lightning, wind breakage, insect damage, cutting, or fungal infection—and this resin combines with the wood and, after years of aging, forms "resin formation." The deeper the wound and the longer the aging, the richer the layers of aroma. So-called "oil-soaked agarwood" on the market is ordinary white wood soaked in essential oil and then pressed; it looks oily but cannot withstand burning. In the next chapter, Shen Zhiyan will encounter true qinan for the first time.