Vintage Myitkyina

I’ve spent the better part of life chasing agarwood nuggets the size of my thumb.

I remember the kind of agarwood I held in Cambodia 15 years ago – irreplaceable pieces we had cut up, not fully appreciating how drastically the story of oud would change.

I bang my head over the expensive chunks of oud we brought back from Baram in 2012. Hardly two years later, the same caliber wood sold for quadruple the price we paid – direct from the hunters.

I could fill pages with anecdotes from across the oud world, places we’ve personally been to, and pieces of oud we should have sold our kidneys for but didn’t.

But at least we got to acquire some pieces during those years, or at least got to see some of those precious pieces. Because there was still wood to see and hold…

I was in Myanmar around the same time, and left there with nothing but news that the wood I was after hasn’t been around for years. While you at least got to see the odd piece in Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam, whatever someone unearthed in Burma got snatched up immediately.

Here we are a decade later and you see hollow Burmese oud chips that resemble the manufactured stuff coming out of Vietnam and Laos sell for $35+ a gram – because it’s still from Burmese soil and still has an echo of the legendary scent profile so few have had the privilege to smell in the past 30+ years.

So, how did I get these pieces?

Well, I didn’t…

These were acquired by Sultan Qaboos likely before I was born. That’s about the time you stopped seeing pieces like this emerge. If it wasn’t for that brief window in time when a select few gained access to the Sultan’s private collection, neither you nor I would have seen Myitkhina wood like this in our lives.

But I didn’t get it from the Sultan. Someone beat me to it …

Many don’t know this, but guess who were the forerunners at scoring the best of the Sultan’s estate? Not the Saudi royal family, not the Gulf princes, nor the Qatari sheikhs.

As has so often been the case in the race for oud the past decade, the guys in Bangkok and Shanghai were there before anyone else even caught wind of what’s going down. Fortunately, we happen to have things they can’t get hold of, so we managed to score back a few pieces. These pieces.

If you buy agarwood purely to heat up, then any one of these pieces could give you a lifetime’s worth of kodo pleasure.

There’s a syrup-like sweetness, but also a syrup-like olfactory texture to the aroma. A thickness, a rich savory tone you don’t pick up on in pretty much any oud chips available today. The closest resemblance would be vintage Indian oud, although there’s a bitter-sweet note I wouldn’t expect from Indian varieties, but rather a profile reminiscent of old Vietnamese and Chinese harvests.

Each of these pieces is resinated through and through, and from the microscope images you can see how fully permeated by oud goodness they are!