Agarwood seedling demonstration base located in Darong Village, Guanzhu Town. Photo by Yang Tengfei
Villagers are grafting the seedlings of the Qinan tree. Photo by Deng Jianqing
Agarwood processing. Photo by Yang Tengfei
Outside the courtyard, a fence of thorn ropes is installed above the wall; inside the courtyard, two square iron bars with thick thumbs protect the tree. The iron bar hangs the sign of "White Strange Mother Tree". From this posture, we can see the importance of this tree to its owner.
"This is the only white mother tree in Guangdong." Chen Shenghan, the owner of the courtyard, said. Similarly, the mother tree of Qinan, known as the sheer green, was also locked up with an iron fence and installed with an electronic alarm.
"Agarwood market on the sale." Wen Zhenxian said that the price of Qinan is mainly measured by quality and fragrance, and is the top variety of agarwood, "The market price of ordinary agarwood is 20 yuan per gram, and the price of high-grade shenshui Qinan is several hundred yuan per gram, and the price close to the level of wild Qinan is more expensive." ”
Wild Qinan is worth a lot, and the Qinan seedlings grafted from the mother tree have also become the darlings of the market, and then developed into a huge industry of 15 million trees per year. These expensive Qinan trees are the foundation of the industrialization of agarwood, which has stirred up the entire electric white agarwood industry in the past few years and become a well-deserved protagonist.
Discover Chinan
The best agarwood is unknown
What is Chinan? According to reports, Qinan is a kind of agar, called agar in ancient times, which is extremely precious. Due to scarcity, the current price of artificial incense is generally a gram of hundreds of yuan to a thousand yuan, natural Qinan agarwood is more expensive, the market has a collection value of a gram of Qinan sold to tens of thousands of yuan.
The traditional agarwood variety of white wood incense can only be picked for about ten years, and the yield is low. In contrast, Shannon's later successful grafting of Qinan wood only takes one or two years to make incense, and 3 years to collect incense, which not only reduces production costs, but also significantly increases yields.
But this strange tree that later stirred up the storm came from Shannon's accidental discovery.
After the founding of New China, wild agarwood trees (white wood incense) still grew everywhere in the Dianbai Mountains. Due to indiscriminate logging and excessive incense collection, the stock of wild agarwood trees in electric white has decreased sharply. In the 1970s, parts of the mountains of Kanju, Shalang, Luokeng, Wangfu, Ma Ta, Xiadong, Huangling, and Naho still had a small number of wild agarwood trees. Later, only a few villages and towns in Dianbai still had some wild agarwood trees living sporadically next to the land temples, temples, and altars. The electric white wild agarwood tree has thus become an endangered plant, leaving only scattered wild plants. In order to protect this "diamond among plants", in 1987, Baimuxiang was listed as a national rare and endangered third-level protected plant; in 1999, Baimuxiang was approved by the State Council as a national second-level key protected wild plant.
As there are fewer and fewer local agarwood trees, Shannon can only move the idea of "leaving home" and go to other places to collect incense. It was also in the process of collecting incense and collecting incense in Huidong, Hailufeng, Hainan and other places that Dianbai Shannong discovered and perceived an unusual agarwood - Qinan.
"At that time, I had to pick the best, and pick the best first." After the best incense is picked, it is only a little worse. The elderly Wang Ruguo said that he used to only pick the best agarwood, when the government's medicinal materials station purchased three grades, he had the most first-class and second-class products, and third-class and other foreign products were difficult to enter his eyes. But now, according to the standards of the time, the third-class product is estimated to be able to sell for hundreds of yuan per gram. Therefore, according to the current classification, the first-class product should be Qinan agarwood.
"Once I plucked a few pounds of agarwood from a tree, and I could smell it across the road." The older generation of incense pickers Gao Shanji did not know what Qinan was at that time, and the incense he picked was sold at the price of ordinary agarwood.
Shannon Wang Jinli once picked the heaviest piece of Qinan and processed it and weighed 40 pounds. He recalled that when he was processing in the camp that night, his nose sucked hard and immediately sneezed, which showed that Qinan's medicine was extremely powerful.
Even Guan Maoyou, who is revered as the "father of agarwood in western Guangdong", initially sold Qinan as ordinary agarwood. Until later, a Japanese Chinese agarwood merchant who had cooperated for many years came to Guan Maoyou and asked for Qinan, and said that it was a Japanese businessman who bought it at a high price and used it to make medicine. Guan Maoyou realized that he had suffered a big loss and understood that Qinan was the best agarwood. However, due to the fact that Qinan grows in the deep mountains and wild mountains, the supply is scarce, after experiencing the initial relatively high output, the wild Qinan agarwood is becoming more and more rare, even if Japanese merchants buy it at a price of thousands of yuan per gram, it is difficult to see the output of Qinan.
Transplanting a mother tree
A priceless legend
The value of wild Qinan, in the legend of "priceless", is known to the world through the word of mouth of Shannon.
Because the traditional agarwood variety of white wood incense has the disadvantages of long growth cycle and low yield of incense, and the amount of oil visible to the naked eye of wild Qinan is high and the value remains high, so many Shannons have begun to transplant wild Qinan trees.
In Guanzhu Shayuan Village, there is a person called "Qinan Dahu" Wen Zhenxian. In the atrium of his house, there is a Qinan agarwood tree surrounded by an iron fence. "When I first went into the mountains to collect incense, I found that the fragrance of this agarwood was very unique, unlike ordinary agarwood. Later, I looked for relevant introductions from some books and found that its smell was very similar to the description of 'Canaan' in the book, so I decided that it was a high-grade agarwood. More than a decade ago, Wen Zhen first transplanted a Qinan tree about one meter high from the mountains into his yard. Today, this small tree has grown to three stories high, and on the branches of the tree, you can see several openings, that is, the place where the incense is artificially formed. "This tree is my town treasure." Wen Zhenxian laughed and said that once a boss bid more than 3 million yuan to buy this Qinan tree, but he did not sell it. In the backyard of Wen Zhen's family, there are also hundreds of Qinan trees, some of which are Qinan mother trees, and some of which are newly cultivated Qinan saplings. These trees, without exception, are precious treasures in Wen Zhenxian's eyes.
In Guanzhu, Shannon, famous for the mother tree of Qinan, is indispensable to the "agarwood Arin". "Agarwood Alin" is Yan Yongbin. Yan Yongbin is famous because he has several "firsts" in the agarwood industry: Dianbai went to Hainan to collect incense from the youngest second-generation Shannon; Dianbai has the most Shannons in the "Green Oil King" Qinan Agarwood Mother Tree......... In the autumn of 1985, due to the difficulties of family life, Yan Yongbin, who was under the age of 15, dropped out of school and traveled with his hometown of Shannon to Hainan to collect incense. Others think that the hard and difficult incense picking work, Yan Yongbin has been doing it for 6 years. One day, Yan Yongbin found 6 agarwood trees with very peculiar oil in the deep mountains, he licked it with his tongue, found that the smell was spicy and prickly, and he was sure that this was what Shannon's predecessors said was the best Qinan. After several twists and turns, Yan Yongbin transported these 6 wild agarwood trees back to the soil, planted them in the old house courtyard, and welded them into an iron fence with 8 centimeters of steel bars to surround the agarwood trees, carefully protecting them like treasures. After the 6 wild agarwood trees were incensed, Yan Yongbin immediately named the "Green Oil King" Qinan, so he also became the Shannon with the most "Green Oil King" Qinan Agarwood Mother Tree in the Dianbai District.
More and more cases have played an exemplary role. So between 2008 and 2010, Shannon in Guanzhu Town dug up wild Qinan trees that can bear the qi nan incense and planted them at home, and it is said that there are dozens of wild qinan "mother trees" successfully transplanted in Shaya Village.
Seedling cultivation
Rare and exotic nan can be artificially planted
Qinan seedlings eventually became "fragrant dumplings", starting from The grafting technology of Qinan.
Because the number of wild Qinan trees is limited after all, after Guanzhu Shannon successively transplanted wild Qinan "mother trees" back to their hometown for planting, they began to try to use the seeds of "mother trees" to breed Qinan saplings. Curiously, however, the offspring that are propagated through seeds rarely grow the Chinan tree, and most of them grow into white wood incense tree species.
"About every 1,000 trees, you can grow one or two Qinan trees, and the rest are white wood incense." Sometimes the probability may be lower. Wen Zhen said first. As a result, how to breed high-quality Qinan trees has become a major topic in Shannon's research. To this end, the Maoming Agarwood Association set up the Qinan Planting Research Committee, and many Shannon joined the research team.
"Could it be that in the process of bee pollination, pollution between different pollens will cause the seeds of Qinan to grow white wood fragrance?" In order to solve this problem, Chen Jinming, secretary of the party branch of the Maoming Municipal Electric White Agarwood Association, made an interesting experiment. He covered a Chinan tree with a gauze net, which was pollinated by bees and isolated from the outer space. It turns out that the vast majority of saplings cultivated using the seeds of the tree are still white wood incense tree species.
"We also tried the method of cutting, and the survival rate was basically zero, and the branches of the cuttings did not take root." Chen Jinming did a lot of experiments that year, but basically they were fruitless.
Seed propagation and cuttings did not work, and shannon later thought of cultivating saplings by grafting. Locally, it is more recognized that Wenzhen was one of the first Shannon to explore the grafting technique of Qinan. In 2005, Wenzhen first transplanted wild Qinan trees back to his yard. Since 2008, Wen Zhenxian has begun to use his own groping grafting technique to cultivate saplings from this tree king.
"A small section containing two leaves is cut from the mature branch of the mother tree and can be grafted onto the rootstock of the white incense tree." Wen Zhen first introduced that grafting into live saplings can grow to half a meter high after half a year, and branches can be cut for grafting.
According to more public information, Shannon successfully cultivated a "generation of Qinan grafted seedlings" in March 2012 after continuous grafting experiments, and in 2014, the "generation of Qinan grafted seedlings" with grafted seedlings of 2 years old were artificially intervened to make incense. In 2015, the batch of artificial intervention in the incense of the Qinan seedlings was accidentally broken by the typhoon, Shannon had to mine the broken Qinan seedlings in advance, but successfully mined the Qinan incense, which is the first case in the country based on the wild "Qinan mother tree", grafted and bred to produce the Qinan tree, and the successful case of The Qinan incense. And this grafting technology also became the basis for the outbreak of the Qinan industry later.
Chinan is grown
The 3 billion yuan industrial chain is extended
The news of the successful grafting of Qinanmiao quickly spread in Guanzhu Town, and many Shannon began to explore and emulate the grafting method. As more and more people use grafting technology and successfully cultivate Chinan saplings, almost everyone in the industry believes that Chinan can be planted on a large scale.
Around 2017, Qinan planting mushroomed like mushrooms in Guanzhu, electric white and even the whole country. This also set off a local upsurge of buying Qinan agarwood saplings, which became Shannon's cash cows at a rate of almost one price a day.
"At the beginning of 2017, the 30-centimeter-tall Qinan seedling sold for one or two hundred yuan. By June, the price rose to 700 yuan a tree. After another two months, I couldn't buy a seedling without 3,000 yuan. By the end of that year, the price was 5,000 yuan and 8,000 yuan per tree, and even the seedlings that had just been grafted and had not yet been fed were rushed to order! Shannon recalled the scene and still felt quite crazy.
It is also in this wave that the seedlings of Qinan agarwood grafted from the mother tree have many branches. Shannon has successively grafted the green oil king, Zhang Spoon, finger pepper, grape vine, ruby, sapphire, wave boy, duck head green, through-top green, golden leaf, Ruhu, oil press, big leaf Po, oil leaf, pointed leaf, concave wood, bullet head, black body round leaf, incense angel No. 1 to No. 10 and other kinds of Qinan seedlings.
Among them, the precious Qinan, the Green Oil King, grafted by Yan Yongbin in Heyuan Village, Guanzhu Town, is grafted with the branches of the mother tree of Qinan (usually measured by two leaf branches) and the local white wood fragrant saplings as rootstocks, and its survival rate is more than 95%.
Huang Chunlong, Wanling Village, Mata Town, has mastered high-tech cultivation technology, planting technology and forest tree disease and pest control technology in many years of planting career and exploration practice. More than 20 kinds of Chi Nan saplings grafted by the mother tree of Chinan are extremely popular in the market. At present, Huang Chunlong has founded the "Maoming Chunlong Qinan Agarwood Planting Professional Cooperative", and its agarwood nursery can produce more than 3 million high-quality Qinan agarwood seedlings every year, which are sold to Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hainan, Yunnan and foreign Vietnam, Golden Triangle and other regions. He also cooperated with Hundreds of Thousands of Qinan Improved Grafting Projects with Baimuxiang Plantations in Guangxi and other foreign countries.
Under the guidance of the professor of South China Agricultural University, the "Tongying Qinan Agarwood Planting Professional Cooperative" founded by Chen Huancheng of Shannong, Guanzhu Town, uses the roots of the Mother Tree of Qinan to make rootstock, retains the original mother tree gene and successfully breeds seedlings, becoming the first person to successfully breed Qinan seedlings with the root of the tree.
In addition to the above, Wen Zhenxian, Lu Hongke and others in Shayuan Village grafted and cultivated through the top of the green, big leaf po, oil press and other Qinan saplings are also the best in the market.
However, the older generation of Shannons like Wen Zhenxian also said that at present, many Qinan seedlings take the young branches of the mother tree and then graft them on the seedlings of the white wood incense tree. After several years of development, most of the seedlings on the market are high-algebraic grafting, coupled with the influence of environmental changes such as water and soil, whether the genes of the original wild grafted mother tree can be well inherited, and whether the quality of the incense will decrease with the increase of the number of grafted algebras, it is not yet known.
However, in any case, the successful grafting of Qinan saplings and the rapid expansion of planting scale have made it a pivotal link in the industrial chain of electric white agarwood, and also helped the electric white agarwood industry to gradually develop into a pillar industry with an annual output value of more than 3 billion yuan. According to the data, at present, there are more than 100,000 mu of agarwood in dianbai area, and 15 million seedlings of Qinan are cultivated annually, accounting for 80% of the national market. In addition to local planting, Qinan saplings have also been exported to Hainan, Fujian, Shantou, the Pearl River Delta and other places, and have also welcomed many merchants from Vietnam, Malaysia, Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries, making the agarwood industry of electric white international.
■ Links
What is Chinan?
Qinan, is a kind of agarwood, that is, canaan incense, an alias of agarwood. In the Qing Dynasty, Cha Shenxing's poem "Learning to Talk with Chen Zhangpu Xin" reads: "The mountain rents and loses the sea shell, and the city is cheap and canonical." "It is the best of the best agar, called agar in ancient times, which is softer than agarwood. Usually in a large piece of high-quality deep spices, only a very small part can be regarded as a Qinan, which is extremely precious. In general, the aroma of Qinan has a rich layer of variation, and the entrance is somewhat spicy, and the general agarwood usually has only a single taste change. Qinan is distinguished by color, which can be divided into white chess, mainly grown in Vietnam; green chess, mainly grown in Vietnam, Guangdong Haifeng, Hong Kong, Hainan; purple chess, mainly grown in Vietnam, Yunnan; yellow chess, in Vietnam, China Hainan, Hong Kong, Yunnan and other places, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar are distributed; black chess, the origin of Vietnam, China, Malaysia, Indonesia is the main distribution.
■Extension
Qinan or Chess? That's a problem
If you walk into Guanzhu Agarwood Street, which is famous for the agarwood industry, and carefully observe the signboard of the frontage storefront, you may find that there are not only those who write "Qinan" but also those who write "Qinan" about the products operated by the store.
According to the data, "Qinan" is a word translated from Sanskrit, and the Buddhist scriptures of the Tang Dynasty are often written as "Dogara", and later there are names such as "Garan", "Ganan", "Qinan", etc., which generally refer to the kind of incense that the monks and monasteries in the southern kingdom in ancient times offered buddhas and burned the best. Many people who love incense later like to use "Qinan", referring to the fact that this type of agarwood fragrance is very different, and it has a unique name.
According to Chen Jinming, secretary of the party branch of the Maoming Municipal Electric White Agarwood Association, in order to unify the name, in 2020, the National Agarwood Association voted on "Qinan" and "Qinan", when 28 votes voted for Qi nan and 27 votes for Qinan. Later, the Electric White Agarwood Association also organized a vote, and more people tended to choose "Qinan". However, as of now, there is still no conclusion on which name to use, so most agarwood practitioners choose words according to their own preferences. However, some practitioners believe that the inconsistency of the name has a negative impact on the publicity and promotion of the industry, and it is recommended to unify as soon as possible.
Written by: Deng Jianqing, trainee reporter of Nanfang Daily
Planner: Huang Xiaomeng Liu Jun
Coordinator: Deng Jianqing, Liu Dongming, Lai Guangzhao