Chinese Agarwood Steps onto the Shanghai Stage: Sanya International Douching Conference Signs "TCM Going Global" Platform to Reach Gulf Buyers

From the South China Sea to the Huangpu River

The 2026 Lujiazui International Health Brand Festival ran in Shanghai from 9 to 13 October 2026, drawing listed companies, industry leaders, time-honoured Chinese brands and intangible-cultural-heritage institutions, with more than 100,000 visitors in total. On the morning of 11 October, the organising committee of the Sanya International Douching Conference held a dedicated promotion session at the main venue, becoming one of the festival's highlights. Speakers included Liu Hongzhi (director of the organising committee), Zhang Shuchen (president of the Sanya Agarwood Association), Wang Keyuan (president of the Guangdong Dianbai Agarwood Association) and Zeng Zhiwei (investment promotion lead), covering conference design, the millennia-old agarwood culture, opportunities and challenges in global markets, and cooperation models.

Signing with "TCM Going Global"

The headline outcome was the strategic agreement between the Sanya organising committee and the "TCM Going Global" cross-border platform. According to public information from Shanghai, the platform already links more than 160 core agarwood distributors and major spice wholesale markets in the Middle East, and will launch an independent cross-border service site in Dubai, offering domestic companies one-stop services from channel matchmaking and cross-border trade to brand promotion and local landing. The Middle East has a deep tradition of spice use that resonates strongly with Chinese incense culture; as early as 2017, the China-UAE Traditional Chinese Medicine Centre was inaugurated in Dubai as the first officially supported TCM centre in the region.

Observation: Standards and Traceability Decide the Outcome

In the roundtable, participants discussed industrial upgrading, integration of incense culture and tourism, and the international branding of the conference. Beyond opportunity, the hard constraints matter: all Aquilaria and Gyrinops species are listed in CITES Appendix II, so both plantation and wild material require permits for cross-border trade, and Gulf buyers typically demand verifiable origin documents, resin content data and grading. In practice, standardised grading, third-party testing and traceable certificates are the real passport for Chinese agarwood abroad.

(This is industry observation and popular-science summary, not investment advice. Buy agarwood through legal channels with traceable, testable sources.)