Tinghai Xiangtang Opens First City Store in Haikou: Hainan Agarwood Moves from Expo Gifts into Everyday Consumption

From display case to street corner: a shift in setting

On Oct 11, the Hainan-rooted agarwood culture brand Tinghai Xiangtang officially opened its first city store at the Westin Haikou. It is the brand's first urban retail location. For Hainan's agarwood value chain, the significance lies in the change of setting: until now, agarwood cultural products mostly appeared as gifts at expositions and trade shows, or sat on souvenir counters in scenic areas and hotels. A city store tries to pull them into an everyday consumer channel — a place you can revisit, smell the incense on the spot, and carry something away on impulse.

Product logic: compact, portable, and verifiable raw material

According to the brand, Tinghai Xiangtang has deep roots in Hainan's agarwood sector and holds 12 national patents. It has appeared at national-level events including the China International Consumer Products Expo and the China Cultural Tourism Expo, was named a “Global Gift” at the CICPE, and took gold at the 2025 Hainan Agarwood & Huanghuali International Trade Fair incense competition as well as a national gold medal at the 2026 China Tourism Commodity Awards — the only Hainan brand to receive that national gold this year. The store centers on the concept “Hainan fragrance, Chinese gift,” showcasing fragrance gifts and incense vessels, with interactive areas for scent sampling and auspicious-pattern stamping. Its flagship portable incense burner integrates burning and storage in a compact, carry-friendly form, reviving traditional incense culture through modern craftsmanship. The incense itself is made from Hainan agarwood powder with no additional binder, offered in insect-bored, lightning-struck and fungal-note varieties, with quality benchmarked against the agarwood monograph in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia.

A new variable in cultural tourism — worth viewing soberly

As Hainan continues building itself into an international tourism and consumption hub, agarwood, as a distinctive local resource, is increasingly packaged into “city gifts” and cultural-tourism retail. Such efforts widen the audience for incense culture and let direct sensory experience, rather than hearsay, become the starting point of purchase. One caveat: finished incense products carry strong experiential and cultural value, and their prices include brand, design and channel costs — a different logic from raw agarwood priced by resin content, origin and years of aging. Buyers would do well to check the stated origin, whether any third-party testing supports the claims, and whether legal proof of provenance is available.

This article is an industry observation and educational summary. It does not constitute trading or investment advice. Purchase agarwood only through legal channels with traceable, testable provenance.