The Chengmai Model: How 30,000 Mu of Agarwood Became a 100-Million-Yuan Industry

English

The Chengmai Model: How 30,000 Mu of Agarwood Became a 100-Million-Yuan Industry

*Chengmai agarwood* refers to the county-level industry built around *Aquilaria sinensis* in Chengmai, Hainan — holder of the titles "Home of Chinese Agarwood" and a national standardised agarwood-planting demonstration zone. Its significance is not acreage but a replicable county playbook: one tree operated as six businesses — nursery, planting, processing, brand, cultural tourism, and digital trading.

The base: 30,000 mu (about one-fifth of the province's total), 21 nurseries, 22 cooperatives, 38 processing entities, 3 industrial parks, annual output value past RMB 100 million (Chengmai county government / China Economic Information Service, 2026). Reports around the 19 Sep 2026 Xinhua Index autumn release put the acreage at 34,000 mu; the difference is a matter of counting date, and this article states both rather than merging them.

The layout — "1246": one brand leading ("Home of Chinese Agarwood"), two cores driving (Jiale and Wenru towns), four towns coordinating and six sites linking up, covering ten priority tasks from planting optimisation to brand export, sci-tech innovation and cultural empowerment. Sub-IPs "Xiangyu Wenru" and "Xiangzhi Jiale" sit under the regional public brand "Chengmai Xiang · Xiang Shijie".

Four levers: (1) Finance — a RMB 2 billion dedicated "agarwood loan" facility plus free seedlings and planting subsidies, carrying growers through the first three cash-flow-free years. (2) Traceability — "one tree, one code", with an international digital trading platform, moving authentication forward to the living tree; in agarwood, trust is the largest cost. (3) Research — the Chengmai Agarwood Industry Doctoral Innovation Station (certified Jan 2026) targets improved-variety breeding, efficient resin induction and deep processing via "resident experts + periodic consultation + tripartite linkage"; a global-first agarwood industry college and the Hainan International Agarwood Industry Research Institute are being prepared. (4) Targets for 2027 — 42,000 mu, a thousand-mu demonstration base, a GAP-standard base, a provincial germplasm bank, and annual seedling capacity of 1.2 million.

Flagship project: the Hainan International Agarwood Sci-Tech Innovation Demonstration Industrial Park in Jiale (signed and started Jan 2026) — RMB 269 million total investment, ~2,000 mu, ~900,000 *Aquilaria* trees, with *Ganoderma* intercropping for "one plot, two harvests". It plans the China (Hainan) International Agarwood Trading Centre and an agarwood museum; projections put annual comprehensive output above RMB 1 billion at full capacity (years 10–12), tax no less than RMB 20 million, and 300–500 jobs. Jiale town itself has 9,550 mu, 4 factories, 5 large-scale bases and 56 specialist processing households.

Provincial frame: the *Hainan Agarwood Whole-Chain Innovation Development Plan (2023–2030)* sets out "two bases, two centres, one model" — international raw-material base, deep-processing base, R&D centre, trading centre, and an integrated primary-secondary-tertiary model — targeting 155,000 mu / 400 t / RMB 2 billion by 2025 and 180,000 mu / 600 t / RMB 5 billion by 2030. Hainan already had 140,000 mu (third nationally) and two geographical-indication certification marks.

Three unresolved gaps (stated officially at the innovation-station ceremony): efficient resin-induction technology is lacking; supply of high-value-added products is insufficient; and research results do not convert smoothly. Provincially, clustering is weak, internationalisation is low, and no leading enterprise has emerged. Chengmai has solved "tree to output value"; "output value to pricing power" is still open — which is exactly why a trading centre is in the plan.

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