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Hong Kong2 min read

The fragrant harbour

Ask anyone what Hong Kong means and they will tell you, fragrant harbour (香港). Fewer people know where the fragrance came from. The best-known answer is a small native tree, and the scent it makes when it is hurt.

Line drawing of an incense tree branch, with incense smoke curling up over a harbour and a junk sail.
Illustration: Hung Lab

A harbour that smelled of incense

The tree is the incense tree, Aquilaria sinensis (土沉香). For centuries it was planted in large numbers in Dongguan and across what are now the New Territories, at places such as Lik Yuen in Sha Tin and Sha Lo Wan.

Its incense travelled overland to a quay at Tsim Sha Tsui, once called Heung Po Tau (香埗頭), “the fragrant quay”. From there sampans carried it round to Shek Pai Wan, today’s Aberdeen, where it was loaded for the Chinese mainland, Southeast Asia and as far away as Arabia. The harbour that handled all this incense became the fragrant harbour, and the name went on to cover the island and, in time, the whole city.

New TerritoriesHong Kong IslandLantauVictoria HarbourIncense groves, Sha TinGroves, Sha Lo WanHeung Po Tau 香埗頭"the fragrant quay", Tsim Sha TsuiShek Pai Wan 石排灣today's Aberdeento the mainland, SE Asia, Arabia
The incense route, drawn as a schematic (not to scale): from the groves, overland to the fragrant quay, by sampan to Shek Pai Wan, then out to sea.

Perfume from a wound

Healthy incense-tree wood does not smell of much. The fragrance, sold as agarwood, appears only when a tree is wounded and infected by fungi. The tree defends itself by filling the damaged wood with a dark resin, rich in sesquiterpenes and chromones, which builds up slowly over years. Natural infection is rare, which is one reason good agarwood is so valuable.

1. A woundBark and wood are broken2. Fungi move inInfection spreads from the wound3. Resin formsDark, fragrant resin seals it off
How agarwood forms: a wound lets fungi in, and the tree answers with a fragrant, dark resin that seals the damaged wood.

A namesake under threat

That value is now the tree’s biggest problem. The incense tree is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, and since the mid-2000s every Aquilaria species has been on CITES Appendix II, which controls international trade. In Hong Kong, illegal felling for agarwood rose sharply in the early 2010s and peaked at 134 recorded cases in 2014. Hong Kong’s trees may now be the last sustained wild population of the species in China.

So the city’s name carries a small piece of plant biology: a tree’s response to injury, traded for centuries and now protected by law. Say “Hong Kong” and you are, in a way, naming a scar.