This story above got me calculating....

Gold price today is slightly over HK$382,000 per kg.
The Heung tree wood price quoted above is $4 million for 43.5kg = $92,000/kg

This means that this wood is priced at about a quarter of the price of gold!
Cut down a few branches of the right tree on a Lamma hill and sell it for a quarter of the price of gold!

Recipe to become an instant multi-millionaire:
Make a single boat trip to Lamma
grab the right type of wood, just as much as you can carry to your boat
return and sell it for millions of dollars
retire!
If you get caught by the police - pretty unlikely - pay the small fine and repeat.

Why are we not flooded by flotillas of boats from the mainland and from all over HK invading our golden forests?

I'm going on another hike atop Ling Kok Shan soon anyway, researching the Sewage Treatment Plant in Sok Kwu Wan. Could anybody point me in the right direction so I won't get the wrong tree, please?
I really love trees, but if they're really worth a quarter of their weight in gold - a very big IF! - who can resist that kind of temptation!

It would be quite an easy .

What is aloeswood?
Aloeswood is an aromatic, resinous heartwood that is found in trees from the aquilaria genus, an evergreen native to South East Asia. It is thought that aloeswood is created by a reaction from an injury to the tree, starting an infection and thus triggering the oleoresin to grow within the heartwood of the tree. It is this resin-impregnated heartwood, which is the actual aloeswood product and is extracted for use as raw wood chips and powder or processed into an oil.

A unique process only known to the Aquilaria species creates aloeswood. The desired odoriferous oleoresin within the heartwood of the tree is a fungal reaction to subsequent injury and infection. The quality of aloeswood depends solely on the amount of oleoresin saturation within the heartwood. Damage by boring insects or ants are possible “vectors of the fungal pathogen” in its natural habitat (Sabah, 164) (Paoli et al., 1722). The fungus, which is triggered by the injury is endophytic, being characterized by spending the “whole or parts of its life cycle colonizing inter or intracellularly inside the healthy tissues of the host plant” without causing any “apparent symptoms of disease” (Shoeb, 21).

The difficulty in pinning down the particular species of fungi leads to one of the reasons why a dependable, high quality, cultivated variety of aloeswood has been illusive so far to botanists and farmers

The simplest way to see whether the tree would have aloeswood would be to cut it down entirely, so that one could have an unhampered look into the tree’s heartwood. Sadly, this technique has led to indiscriminate destruction of the species in the wild due to unknowledgable collectors “lured by quick riches” from stories of windfalls of cash due to aloeswood finds in the jungle

First, when aloeswood-producing trees are planted, as with many other farmed cash crops (e.g. teak, coffee, tea), a period of time is needed before the actual harvest can take place. Harvest timeline estimates say that after 3 years, seedlings can be inoculated, there is then a minimum waiting period of five years, making harvests possible on an 8-year cycle (Paoli et al., 1731). The trees are artificially wounded, using many different techniques including drilling, slashing areas of the tree in particular patterns, and impregnating the trees with certain fungi or chemicals with inserted pvc tubing which would remain in the tree for the duration of its life (Persoon, 251, 254).

The Rainforest Foundation Project (RFP), a “European-based foundation dedicated to the preservation of the world’s forests” has been important in assisting the start of a sustainable aloeswood farms and markets for local farmers. Started in 1995, the RFP has had impressive success in establishing alternatives to wild-based harvesting which are economically and environmentally sustainable. With funding from the European Commission, they are able to implement what they call “people based conservation”.

The RFP focuses on three main areas: education, research, and conservation. They use education and training to empower Vietnamese farmers to be able to make the switch from forest-based harvesting to sustainable, farm-raised, claiming their program is an “ideal way of generating income and employment for low-income families living in and around project areas.” The RFP also conducts research, assisting in areas such as infection inducement and commercial strategies after harvest. Finally, RFP promotes conservation by calling for stricter bans and more education offered to those in the aloeswood industry. They claim that “Aquilaria plantations can be successfully developed as an agro-forestry enterprise”, and state that they have been highly successful in inducing aloeswood in plantation grown trees to yield a valuable commercial product.

The RFP has two separate projects in Vietnam; one in An Giang which was completed in 2001 with the planting of 20,000 seedlings, and a second project which is an aquilaria nursery, in Kon Tum. They have also began to set its sights on other projects in countries such as Lao PDR and the Kingdom of Bhutan

I think this is the one that Liz Gower was offering seedlings of last year. Her idea is to plant the tree in various locations, and as it is a protected species, that could be invoked if someone wanted to change land use etc.