Sandalwood

Sandalwood is the heartwood of Santalum album and related species, prized for a sweet, persistent fragrance that resides in the dense inner wood and its oil rather than in leaf or bark. The scent is unusually long-lasting, which made sandalwood central to incense, perfumery and the carving of devotional objects across South and Southeast Asia. That same value has a cost worth stating plainly: slow-growing wild sandalwood has been heavily overharvested, and Santalum album is now classed as vulnerable, its trade regulated, a modern pressure that the older symbolic literature naturally does not mention.

A related but distinct species, Santalum spicatum, native to Western Australia, supplied a major nineteenth-century export industry of its own, with sandalwood shipped in large quantities from the colony to the incense and cabinet-making markets of China, for a time one of Western Australia's most valuable exports, an economic history largely separate from, though botanically related to, the South and Southeast Asian sandalwood trade this article otherwise describes. Modern sandalwood plantations, both of Santalum album in India and of Australian and Pacific species, have been established specifically to relieve pressure on wild populations, a direct agricultural response to the conservation pressure already noted.

In Hinduism sandalwood paste (chandana), ground from the wood with water, is applied to images of deities and to the foreheads of worshippers as a cooling, purifying and auspicious mark, and it scents temples and shrines. It is burned in the cremation fire, so that its fragrance attends both worship and death, and it is used in the making of malas and carved icons. Buddhism and Jainism share the reverence, and sandalwood is among the incenses of Chinese and Japanese temple practice. The wood's prestige rests on the plain fact of its fragrance and its durability; the specific ritual meanings, purity, devotion, the honouring of the divine and the dead, are read onto a scent that genuinely lingers where others fade.

Mysore sandalwood, from the historic Indian region now in Karnataka, became internationally the most prized source of the essential oil, so renowned that Mysore sandalwood oil later received Geographical Indication protection in India, a modern legal recognition of a reputation built up over centuries of temple and perfumery use, much as Kazanlak rose oil or Champagne carry protected regional names in Europe. Wild Mysore sandalwood has become increasingly scarce and tightly regulated by Indian state forestry law given the tree's slow growth and high value, so that today much of the incense-grade wood on the world market comes instead from plantation-grown Australian trees, a supply shift within living memory of anyone who has bought sandalwood incense across several decades.