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although the woodcutters have left but few trees there and at Wong-nei-chung, yet formerly it grew abundant there. In the time of the Hon Dynasty, this wood, it is said, was highly valued, and formed an article of tribute" (HKDP, 1873).
The incense industry received a severe blow from which it never recovered during the coastal evacuation ordered by the emperor K'ang-hsi from 1662-1669. The Kuang-tung hsin-yu notes that, "there were very few people left after the evacuation, and less than one tenth of the incense growers were left. Most serious of all, old trees had been cut down, and those which were left were only ten to twenty years old”. Those who survived this evacuation experienced another disaster during the reign of Yung-Cheng (1723-1735) when a magistrate, obsessed with a love of high grade incense, killed a number of incense growers. The remaining growers then cut down the rest of their trees and fled (Chang, 1963). The trade in incense wood, however, continued with supplies of sandalwood from New South Wales imported during the nineteenth century and milled into powder by water-powered mills in the Tsuen Wan area. A detailed account of the history of this trade and the manufacture of incense is given in Chan (1989).
The statement that Aquilaria sinensis is not native but was introduced from North Vietnam is questioned by Iu (1983), as the species appears to be indigenous to Hong Kong and is commonly found in fung shui woods where it freely regenerates to form a component of the subcanopy layer. Dunn and Tutcher (1912) stated that in 1912, in a one-acre plot of fung shui woodland on lower ground in Hong Kong, 31 out of 125 trees examined were Aquilaria sinensis (then known as A. Grandiflora). A report by Nichols (1978) found that at Uk Tau on the Sai Kung peninsula, a third of the trees in the fung shun wood were incense trees, ten times as many as in neighbouring natural woodland, and that an old man in the village said that heung trees were cultivated there in living memory for the incense trade.
Because a tree was once grown in plantations, of course, has no bearing as to whether or not it is native. Whether or not the present-day incense trees are remnants of former plantations or whether incense trees were ever cultivated in fung shui woods may never be known, but none of the village representatives questioned during a study carried out by the author into fung shui woods between 1990 and 1995 ever