Ten Years of Agarwood, Chapter Two: Qinan

Shen Zhiyan truly came to understand agarwood starting from a piece of "wood that goes soft."

In his third week after taking over the shop, Zhou Bo fished a small brocade box from the cloth pouch he kept close to his body and opened it. Inside lay a piece of green the size of a fingernail. Not green exactly — dark green with an oily sheen, like spring frozen solid.

"Touch it," Zhou Bo said.

The moment Shen Zhiyan's fingertip touched it, he suspected he was seeing things — the edge of the wood seemed to sink slightly into the pad of his finger, as if he had touched the finest of ointments.

"This is qinan," Zhou Bo said, pushing the box toward him. "The king of agarwood. Ordinary agarwood is hard; qinan is soft — the trade calls it 'soft silk.' Pinch it with your fingernail and it springs back, leaving an oily mark."

"Qinan or qinan?" Shen Zhiyan asked.

"Both are written, the pronunciation is the same. The older generation writes 'qi,' Lingnan writes 'qi.'" Zhou Bo did not care about that. "Just remember one thing: true qinan smells cool when raw, like holding a mint leaf on your tongue — the coolness drills up into your forehead, not the kind of scent that slaps you in the face like perfume. That is the first of its three qualities: 'cool, sweet, penetrating.'"

Shen Zhiyan brought the piece of qinan close to his nose. The coolness indeed arrived first, followed by a thread of honeyed sweetness, and in the tail note there was even a hint of floral fragrance, faint and elusive, like smelling the magnolias in a courtyard through a screen window. He suddenly understood why his father would rather keep a small shop than go into business that brought in quick money — it turned out there was a kind of fragrance in this world that had to be "read" with the nose.

"Then how do you tell real from fake?" he asked.

Zhou Bo held up three fingers: "Look, smell, burn."

"Look — look at the oil lines. The resin of real agarwood grows along the wound the tree itself made; the lines run naturally, some deep, some shallow, like the traces left by flowing water. The 'oil' in oil-soaked goods is absorbed from the outside, uniformly fake; scrape it open and inside it is deathly white wood."

"Smell — smell the layers. Natural agarwood has distinct top, middle and base notes — cool, sweet, medicinal, woody — emerging one layer at a time. Chemical essences smear it all on at once, and after smelling them for a while you get a headache."

"Burn — the most reliable. Take a little broken material and pass a lighter over it. The smoke of the real thing is blue-white and rises straight, with a clear, moist scent; the smoke of the fake turns yellow and curls, with a reek of glue. The old saying goes, 'burn incense to tell true from false' — the word 'burn' is the most ruthless."

Shen Zhiyan silently repeated these three treasures — "look, smell, burn" — then suddenly remembered something and dug out of the drawer the string of "9.9-yuan sinking-grade bracelet" he had seen online a few days earlier, and handed it to Zhou Bo.

Zhou Bo merely weighed it in his hand and laughed: "Sinking grade? If you put it in your palm and it sinks by itself, that is sinking grade. This string is light as a feather — it has been weighted. They poured lead inside it; otherwise how could white wood ever sink?"

"Lead?"

"There are plenty of tricks." Zhou Bo tossed the string back onto the counter. "Oil injection, compression, line-drawing, splicing — six kinds of forgery craft, and I have seen them all these past few years. The most vicious is 'compressed sinking grade' — white-wood scraps pressed into blocks in a mold, then soaked in oil, looking more real than the real thing."

That night, Shen Zhiyan could not sleep. He dug out the ledger his father had left behind; on the last page was a line of small, elegant handwriting: "The way of agarwood lies not in price but in sincerity. Sincere to the wood, sincere to people." Time had bled the ink outward, like a tear not quite wiped away.

He thought of what Zhou Bo had said that day — nine out of ten goods on the market are fake. If even an old shop like Shen's had to rely on an old man guarding the gate with his nose, then whom should the young people on the streets ordering with their phones believe?

The next day, he hung a new wooden sign at the shop entrance, on which he had clumsily carved four characters with his own knife: Only Real Agarwood Sold.

Zhou Bo saw it, walked around it twice with his hands behind his back, said nothing, and finally snorted through his nose, as if in laughter.

The wind blew in from the Pearl River estuary, carrying a salty, fishy dampness. Standing behind the counter, Shen Zhiyan felt for the first time that this old shop might not be impossible to hold on to.

*（End of Chapter Two）*

> Author's Note · What You'll Understand After Reading This: Qinan is the top grade of agarwood; because it contains special components it takes a "soft silk" form, and a fingernail can pinch out an oily mark. Smelled raw, it is cool, sweet and penetrating, the coolness reaching the brain. Connoisseurs have three methods for identifying agarwood — look at whether the oil lines are natural, smell whether the layers are distinct, and burn to check whether the smoke color and scent are clear and moist; common forgery techniques include oil-soaking, oil injection, compression, and lead weighting. In the next chapter, Shen Zhiyan will set out on the road of collecting agarwood for the first time and walk into a real rainforest.