Reference point
A piece of Tonkin rosewood, sanded hard, the dust smelled.
Do this before you read on. An entry only works when you have just smelled the thing.
Deeply sweet, with a traditional-medicine note and a faint layer of leather. Very heavy and very lasting, hardly evaporating.
This is the most expensive wood in Vietnam and also the most mythologised. Most of its value comes from collectors’ demand rather than from its properties as a material, and smell is one of the grounds buyers use to tell real from fake.
It differs from sandalwood in having no creaminess. Where sandalwood is soft and milky, Tonkin rosewood is dry and medicinal.
How to smell it
Sand the surface hard and smell the dust as it falls. Genuine Tonkin rosewood gives a clear smell as soon as it is sanded; fakes usually smell only of ordinary wood or of fragrance soaked into the surface.
Why this one is hard
Because genuine samples are very hard to get hold of, and because the market is flooded with fakes.
Don’t confuse with
This entry
Tonkin rosewood
Woody & Resinous family
Tonkin rosewood is dry, with a traditional-medicine note; sandalwood is soft and milky. This is a pair wood buyers tell apart with their own noses.
Scientific note
Tonkin rosewood (Dalbergia tonkinensis) is a protected species with very high commercial value, so most of the information in circulation comes from the trade rather than from published research. We do not use those sources, and we leave the mechanism blank until verifiable data exist.
In Vietnamese life
The Tonkin rosewood craze of the 2010s led to trees being cut down illegally on the streets of Hanoi. It is one of the few cases where the value of a smell had direct social consequences.