Ten Years of Agarwood, Chapter Two · Qinan (Kyara)

Shen Zhiyan truly came to understand incense starting from a piece of "wood that could soften."

In the third week after taking over the shop, Uncle Zhou fished a small brocade box out of the cloth pouch he kept close to his body, flipped it open, and inside lay a piece of green the size of a fingernail. Not green—it was dark green shot through with an oily sheen, like a frozen spring.

"Touch it," Uncle Zhou said.

The moment Shen Zhiyan's fingertip touched it, he suspected his eyes were playing tricks on him—the edge of the wood seemed to sink slightly into his fingertip, as if he had touched the finest of ointments.

"This is qinan(kyara)," Uncle Zhou pushed the brocade box toward his eyes, "the king of agarwood. Ordinary agarwood is hard; qinan(kyara) is soft—the trade calls it 'soft thread.' Pinch it with your fingernail and it springs back, leaving an oily mark."

"Qinan or qinan?" Shen Zhiyan asked.

"Both are written; they sound the same. The old generation wrote 'qi'(奇); Lingnan writes 'qi'(棋)." Uncle Zhou didn't care about that. "Just remember one thing: true qinan(kyara) smells cool the moment you sniff it raw, like holding a mint leaf in your mouth—the coolness drills up into your forehead, not the kind of fragrance that slaps you in the face like perfume. That's the first of its three characters: 'cool, sweet, penetrating.'"

Shen Zhiyan brought the piece of qinan(kyara) close to his nose. The coolness indeed arrived first, followed by a thread of honeyed sweetness, and in the tail note there was even a hint of floral fragrance, faint and elusive, like smelling the magnolias in the courtyard through a screen window. He suddenly understood why his father would rather keep a small shop than go into fast-money business—it turned out there was a kind of incense in this world that had to be "read" with the nose.

"Then how do you tell real from fake?" he asked.

Uncle Zhou held up three fingers: "Look, smell, burn."

"Look—look at the oil lines. Real incense's oil is grown by the tree itself along the wound; the lines run naturally, some deep, some shallow, like the traces of flowing water. The 'oil' in oil-soaked goods is absorbed from the outside, uniformly fake; scrape it open and inside it's ghastly white wood."

"Smell—smell the layers. Natural agarwood has distinct top, middle, and base notes: cool, sweet, medicinal, woody, emerging layer by layer. Chemical fragrance oils plaster it on all at once, and smelling it too long gives you a headache."

"Burn—that's the most reliable. Take a bit of broken material and run a lighter over it. Real incense smoke is blue-white and rises straight, with a clear, moist scent; fake smoke turns yellow and curls, with a gluey smell. The old saying goes, 'burn incense to tell true from false'—the word 'burn' is the harshest."

Shen Zhiyan silently recited the three treasures of "look, smell, burn," then suddenly remembered something. He dug out of the drawer a string of "nine-yuan-ninety-cent sinking-grade bracelet" he had seen online a few days earlier and handed it to Uncle Zhou.

Uncle Zhou just weighed it in his hand and laughed: "Sinking grade? Put it in your palm—if it sinks by itself, that's sinking grade. This string is light as a feather; it's been weighted—lead poured inside, otherwise how could white wood ever sink?"

"Lead poured in?"

"There are plenty of tricks." Uncle Zhou tossed the string back onto the counter. "Oil injection, compression, drawn lines, splicing—six faking techniques, I've seen them all these past few years. The worst is 'compressed agarwood'—white wood scraps pressed into blocks with a mold, then soaked in oil; it looks more real than the real thing."

That night, Shen Zhiyan couldn't sleep. He dug out the account book his father had left behind; on the last page was a line in small, delicate handwriting: "The way of incense lies not in price but in sincerity. Sincere to the wood, sincere to people." The ink had bled with the years, like a tear not quite wiped away.

He thought of what Uncle Zhou had said that day—nine out of ten goods on the market are fake. If even an old shop like Shen's had to rely on an old man guarding the gate with his nose, then the young people ordering on their phones all over the streets—who were they supposed to believe?

The next day, he hung a new wooden sign at the shop entrance, on which he had crookedly carved four characters with a knife: **Only Real Incense Sold**.

Uncle Zhou saw it, circled it twice with his hands behind his back, said nothing, and finally snorted through his nose, as if laughing.

The wind blew in from the Pearl River estuary, carrying a salty, fishy dampness. Standing behind the counter, Shen Zhiyan felt for the first time that this old shop might not be impossible to hold on to after all.

*(End of Chapter Two)*

> **Author's Note · What You'll Understand After Reading This**: Qinan (kyara) is the top grade of agarwood; due to its special composition it exhibits "soft threads," and oil traces can be pinched out with a fingernail. Smelled raw, it is cool, sweet, and penetrating, with a coolness that reaches the brain. Agarwood connoisseurs have three methods of appraisal—**look** at whether the oil lines are natural, **smell** whether the layers are distinct, and **burn** to see whether the smoke color and scent are clear and moist; common counterfeits involve soaking in oil, injecting oil, compression, and adding lead to increase weight. In the next chapter, Shen Zhiyan will set out on the path of collecting incense for the first time, entering a true rainforest.雨林。