Feng Shui: Whole Tree without leaves

Whole trees are dug up with leaves taken out. Furthermore, roots will be kept for standing; whitewood will be carved away to make some display arts from the whole Aquilaria trees. It is believed to attract fortune and positive energy

 There are three trees wrapped ready to be sent by a local truck.

A display tree in an office.

 A painstaking process, it takes a week to complete carving.

Beautiful infection

Holes from nails where agarwood was formed. 

These trees are sold locally due to high freight cost.

Agarwood, the defence mechanism, formed around the wounded or injured area usually, in contrast, the "white" area contains no resin.   

Fengshui: Agarwood Decor

Large decor agarwood pieces displayed. 

Agarwood incenses

 Joss-sticks: worshipping incenses 

The quality standard 

Let's discuss the usage purpose of joss-stick

Joss-stick incenses, which can be seen in temples (Buddhist, Hindu)) or at individual home,  is mainly used for worshipping purpose. Usually, each prayer burns ten joss-sticks for different needs. You may ask where number 10 came from? Here is the answer: there are many Gods in a temple. When worshipping, prayer use 1 to 3 joss-sticks for each God.

In some unique festivals, there are thousands of visitors in every hour, and if you multiplied it by 10, you would get the number of joss-sticks used daily in each temple, which could be over one hundred thousand easily.

The smoke from these burning incenses could impair your vision, bring tears to your eyes, suffocate visitors. To maintain proper ventilation, temple staff frequently patrol to put out burning incenses and make space for newcomers/ prayers. 

In short, joss-stick incenses are for burnt and certainly not for scent enjoyment. For this purpose, the less smoke, the better.  Incenses made from sawdust can easily satisfy the requirements. However, people want to smell something, especially something woody. Due to the higher cost of traditional production, sawdust and chemical fragrance were used instead of plant material, making it unsafe to light up. If you were familiar to Ho Chi Minh City, you would probably know Kim Bien market, where you could buy most chemical here, from synthetic fragrance, food colouring, and industrial specific chemical compound. So to cut cost, sawdust will be submerged into fragrance chemical, and this process creates toxic smoke. 

Solutions?

The most straightforward solution is to stop burning but as offering incense is part of the culture, so to make a cost-effective incense is an alternative.

Non-infected white Aquilaria wood and natural adhesive (Litsea Glutinosa) were compounded into a mixture which was later on pasted on a bamboo joss, then dried up under sunlight or machine.

These white Aquilaria woods contain little-infected parts, which are perfect to create joss-stick incenses.

It will create a burnt wood smell, and sometimes, a hint of agarwood, very cost-effective solution: retail at $2.50 for 100g package.

Traditionally, for the King or noble family, or only a customised order, genuine agarwood (infected) or sandalwood will be added in to amplify the worshipping atmosphere. This product still can be produced and usually best to be used at home where you feel a closer connection with your ancestors.

This product contains low resin content, hence the lower price. If you are after koh-do style enjoyment, this is not for you.

Disclosure:

One of our brand: Yen Incense: a better worshipping experience:

https://www.facebook.com/YENincense/

Stickless or coreless incense, scent enjoyment: an alternative way to agarwood chip heating

The main ingredient: pulverised agarwood powder made from the below material

It takes more than two years to form these resin and hours of whitewood scrapping to specifically create this resin sheet.

The advantage: FLAT, lightweight, high resin content and scent consistency. By being lightweight and flat, more than 95% of the box volume would be fulfiled which saving you an enormous amount of shipping cost; especially you are wholesaler or incense maker.

Please note the below packing, it only contains 60% of the box volume, if you add 40% more, you will save a lot of postage because it costs the same to ship.

In this particular example, box dimension: 80 cm x 60 cm  x 80 cm,

• Volume weight: 77 kg (maximum kg allowed)
• potentially can have 20kg of these flat chips ( deadweight) or
• 10 to 12 kg of a cone or irregular wood chips or
• 30 litre of oil

Each artisan incense house has its speciality and formulation. For agarwood incenses on the market, this flat woodchip is the common ingredient due to high resin content and excellent shipping cost At Grandawood, we have our incenses manufactured by Shoyeido and us. You can visit more here.

These flat agarwood chip once ground, will become incense powder which is one of the core ingredients of agarwood incense.

Agarwood beads making material

This is all about agarwood formation; some parts are hard enough to be cut into square pieces first and later on in sphere shape.

 ....... others are rotten, and softwood and fiberboard felt, suitable for grinding, pulverising to make agarwood powder (incense powder), for example, the below