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.