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Hi,
I'm looking to buy one of these brush pots and really need a second opinion as to the wood type to be sure that I'm paying the right price. I've attached 3 photo's of the first one I'm looking at and will attach three more of the second one in a comment below. Any opinions and responses are highly appreciated. Thank you, Ella

I think this brushpot is Dalbergia benthamii. Whether you would call it huanghuali depends largely on the books you read. D. benthamii is referred to as Zitan by Gustav Ecke, but we (students of Sickmann's mirky subject) have since come to accept that only Pterocarpus santalinus can truly be referred to as Zitan wood, or as Ecke puts it "TZU'-T'AN" - if, that is - the imperial nature of the word is to be taken as significant. Ellisworth also classifies it so, but really he is just referencing Ecke, and doesn't venture an opinion either way. There are regardless many conflicting publications that attempt to answer the question "what is this huanghuali wood" The current paradigm tends to reference 1990: Connoisseurship of Chinese Furniture: Ming and Early Qing Dynasties, Shih-Hsiang Wang, in which he references a local botanist's 1956 paper where this botanist re-names Dalbergia Hainanesis Dalbergia odorifera. I personally am not particularly convinced by Shixiang's reasons for making this connection, in fact I would say the botanist was far more likely drawing our attention to the distinction between huali & xinhuali, but suffice it to say 'D.odorifera' is now used as the 'scientific' classification for an umbrella group of aromatic Leguminosae family species endemic to the Eastern seaboard of Eurasia from Fujian to Vietnam called huali wood by the Guandong timber merchants. Not terribly enlightening, I know, but to get an idea of the scale of difficulty in answering this question, you must first realise there are over 200 Dalbergia species alone, and that various Pterocarpus & Ormoisa genera species were also referred to as huali wood by Guandong timbermerchants of the Ming & Qing dynasties, all of which have significant characteristic crossovers, and are to a large extent very difficult to tell apart, even under an electron microscope. Be all this as it may, a group of I think it was 34 species were identified in 2002 paper published @ Beijing agricultural, which, although significantly narrowing the list down, still leaves the paradigm open to interpretation. People also have a tendency to ignore the fundamentally important first part of the word, the 'huang' of huanghuali. What distinguishes huali wood from huanghuali, is how the raw material through a natural process of osmosis called spelting, lightens up as it looses moisture & accentuates the grain. It truly is the age of the piece that is as important as the raw material itself. So, you see - there is no such thing as huanghuali wood. At any rate, this is a beautiful brushpot. D. benthamii (true Palisander) is, and has long been, regarded among the most rare and valuable of the precious Asian tropical hardwoods. If it has genuine age - all the better.

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