In the agarwood market, some merchants use a variety of promotional tactics, and with agarwood products that look extremely similar, consumers find it difficult to distinguish between genuine and fake, often leading to situations where they “pay a high price for counterfeit goods.”
The Truth Behind “Full of Oil”
Polishing and Soaking: Low-Quality Agarwood Can Also Be Sold at High Prices
In an agarwood e-commerce live stream, the merchant’s promotional language almost always revolves around “oil” — terms like “360 degrees full of oil,” “fake one, pay ten thousand,” and “genuine and fairly priced.”
Based on consumer leads, a visit was made to the core area of the “Hometown of Chinese Agarwood” in the southeastern region. At night, the “agarwood night market” becomes even livelier, with hundreds of merchants gathering in the town square to set up open-air stalls, offering a wide variety of agarwood products.
Merchants explained that the night market mostly sells cultivated Kynam bracelets, with ordinary ones priced at around ten to twenty yuan per gram, while those that can sink in water vary greatly in price, ranging from ten yuan to three hundred yuan per gram—a difference of nearly thirty times.
A representative explained that Kynam evolves from agarwood, with a softer texture, higher oil content, richer aroma, and more stringent formation conditions, making it far more expensive than ordinary agarwood in the collectibles, incense, and收藏 sectors.
However, wild Kynam has long been listed in the “National Key Protected Wild Plants List,” with protection for wild agarwood elevated to strict national control. The existing wild Kynam now ranges in price from thousands to hundreds of thousands of yuan per gram, highlighting its scarcity.
The Forestry Industry Standard of the People’s Republic of China LY/T 3137-2019 “General Technical Requirements for Agarwood Products” clearly stipulates:
A representative stated that the core of agarwood product craftsmanship lies in “preserving natural authenticity,” with simpler processes being better. Because the core value of agarwood is its natural attributes, excessive processing can damage this attribute, reducing its value.
A representative explained that Kynam prices mainly depend on grade, which is keyed to oil content—higher oil content means better density, weight, and aroma, with “sinking grade” being the recognized standard for quality.
Size and craftsmanship also affect price—larger sizes of the same grade are more expensive, round beads cost more
