Xiang Gang

It’s a weird sensation to be still lingering in the afterglow of the Hong Kong OudFest. The enthusiasm of the attendees was unlike what we’ve experienced before. 

It’s not like there’s an off-chance you could still find an oud tree on someone’s land, and while oud trees do exist in the protected forests of Hong Kong, no one dares even look that way. Oud from HK has been off the map for years. 

It’s almost equally impossible to find vintage harvests, or even a small piece – something any agarwood collector will attest to.

But this isn’t just a story of Hong Kong. The reason this oil is seeing the light is courtesy of the love we saw from everyone on our trip. Folks flew in from China, while locals who’d known each via forums and EO discussion threads finally got to meet in person at the EO OudFest.

We felt right at home. 

Hong Kong and Yunnan were frequent topics of conversation at the event. Some didn’t even realize Hong Kong had oud – it’s been that long. As for Yunnan, the echoes of this legendary profile still rang in people’s questions.

That’s what brings you to reading this. 

What if you could smell a cohort of vintage Yunnan and Hong Kong harvests in one bottle? What if you could steal the wafts of Hong Kong’s classic bitter red as you sipped the delicate citrus sinensis tea from an old-school Yunnan brew?

But Xiang Gang isn’t a throwback to yesteryear as most vintage ouds are…

If you ever got your hands on uber-limited harvests from these two renowned jungles to co-distill, your first impulse might well be to craft the setup so they’d evoke the aroma you’d expect to have smelled forty years ago.

In the world of oud, time portals do exist. There are vintage ouds, Hyang Kang and Yu Nan included, that transport you back to a different era. 

But imagine you did, in some unfathomable scenario, unearth Hong Kong and Yunnan agarwood today. What if, instead of going with anyone’s first instinct, you deliberately don’t go for the old-school tone and aim to discover what such a duo would smell like if distilled today? 

Wouldn’t that smell be even more unique? Rather than going back in time, you’d transport your sifu’s granddad to today and let him smell oud of the future…

When it comes to all the techniqueing and tweaking when distilling oud, there’s knowledge and equipment our predecessors didn’t have access to. They couldn’t capture the scent of Kambojia Senkoh no matter the caliber wood that went into the pots.

Xiang Gang is thus a meeting point of gone-and-forgotten vs. modern. Vintage agarwood and the scent properties dormant in such wood that would not be present in younger generation trees – distilled with a modern angle. 

That’s how you could sweeten a classic Hong Kong’s red bitterness and inject a cloud of beeswax-laced tobacco leaf into the resinous zest of an otherwise tangy Hindi-like Yunnanese oud. You could remove the elaborate ornamentation, if you will, and zoom in on the ouds’ zen-like Senkoh effect. Pure resin, under the microscope.

For any techy reading this, Xiang Gang is 100% full-spectrum. There was no fractionation involved to create a ‘cleaner’ pitch (the beautifully clean tone is courtesy of quality agarwood and the distillation style). The profile is packed with flavor, the sweetened red honey note of Hong Kong lined with an outpouring of Yunnan’s bitter twang.

It’s like you’re smelling a super fine assortment of HK and Yunnan slivers on low-temp but with the effect of heating on charcoal – you can smell all the discreet nuances, the subtle notes of pepper and tea that low-temp heating will evoke, but at the same time Xiang Gang has stunning olfactory reach.

The scent projects so well I wish we didn’t have so little of it, so that I could use it in a perfume! The red bitter zesty citrus effect would have been off the hook.

This one goes out to the gang in Hong Kong and our brothers who flew in from as far north as the Mongolian border. A vintage duo with a modern flavor; the only one of its kind I know of.

Featured Testimonials…

I haven’t smelled much of any premium Ouds in general so the only benchmark and comparison I could make is just based on my personal scent memory and experience with mostly Cultivated Ouds. It won’t be a fair comparison so take it for what it’s worth.

This one is very clean, with some floral, menthol, bread dough, medicinal, and some bitterness. There’s a slight hint of either mineral or metallic (could just be perception) in the mid dry town, and the medicinal and camphor notes are a bit more pronounced after 30min or so as well.

Strangely, there’s also a bit of dark purpleness lurking in the far background as well, almost reminded me of something hidden in the Oud Sultani series perfume, but I just can’t quite point my finger at what it is, maybe a bit of Malay or perhaps the Vietnamese variety with that medicinal facet?

I’m getting Zero barnyard, no hay or anything like that.

There’s a lot of depth and different nuances in this, great projection, and all the notes are pretty well-balanced in general. I’m not an Oud connoisseur so please take this initial impression as a grain of salt, haven’t got enough experience in

Ouds to form any definitive conclusion, I’m more of a Musk man. lol

Unless you’re a cigar connoisseur and have been collecting and smoking different cigars for years and years, otherwise if I gave you an aged Cuban cigar and a regular Dominican cigar, the chances are…you won’t know why one cost significantly more than the other, and you’ll most likely say….”Well, they both taste like tobacco!!”  Same thing applies here, all i can tell you is what I could perceive, and taste is subjective anyway, what is better to me doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better for YOU.

It takes time to develop your taste bud, the same goes for olfactory, all I know is, this is an interesting Oud with a good amount of depth and complexity, probably meant for the Oud Connoisseur who knows how to appreciate the good stuff. 

—Ben W / USA