A sculpture carved out of agarwood from Tarakan, Indonesia.

Many rich Chinese are buying luxury brands of famous designer perfumes, but the ultimate luxury fragrance — one far costly than gold — is agarwood or chen xiang (沉香), an ancient Oriental fragrance.

Increasingly Chinese are rediscovering their appreciation for agarwood, which played a role as incense and oil in religious rituals throughout Asia and the Middle East. The deeply aromatic fragrance is considered an aid to meditation and was very popular in ancient China.

Pieces of natural wood and fragrant carvings are sought by collectors. Incense and essential oil are precious. Whenever it is burned, heated or simply placed at room temperature, it gives off a pleasant aroma — from subtle to intense.

What could be more luxurious than simply burning a piece of high-quality chen xiang that costs 10,000 yuan (US$1,629) per gram of highest quality and savoring the fragrance. And then it’s gone, up in smoke. But worth it, many people say.

Arguably the most costly fragrance in the world is complex, layered and difficult to describe. It is sweet, rich and deep but balanced. It’s also called earthy, smoky and sweet — deeply pleasing.

For most people, chen xiang (literally “wood with mellow fragrance”) is just a piece of rotten wood.

It literally is rotten. Agarwood is a dark resinous heartwood that forms in aquilaria and gyrinops trees when they become infected with a particular fungus. Before infection, the heartwood is relative pale in color, but the tree produces a dark aromatic resin in response to the attack. It is this resinous wood that is valued in many cultures.

The trees are large evergreens native to Southeast Asia, but most have been cut down and now trees are commercially raised and infected with fungus in a long process.

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