Benzoin has been traded for well over a thousand years, and for most of that time the people buying it had never seen the tree. Its history is a history of names, routes and substitutions.
A name that travels
The oldest reliable trade name is Arabic: lubān jāwī, “frankincense of Java”. Lubān is the ordinary Arabic word for frankincense; jāwī meant Java in the loose medieval sense that covered Sumatra and much of the archipelago. The resin was not frankincense, but to a merchant who burned it, it sat in the same category: an aromatic tree resin from the east.
Moving west, the word shed its first syllable. Italian merchants wrote benzoì and bengiuì; Spanish took benjuí, Portuguese benjoim, Catalan benjuí, French benjoin. In English the resin was benjamin in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (“gum benjamin” survives in old pharmacy labels) before benzoin won out. The chemists then borrowed the resin’s name: benzoic acid was isolated from it in the sixteenth century by sublimation, and when nineteenth-century chemists worked out the ring structure at the heart of that acid they called it benzene.
Southeast Asia and China
The tree was tapped in Sumatra long before the resin had a European name. The Batak highlands around Lake Toba have grown kemenyan for ritual, medicine and trade for centuries; it was one of the goods that made Sumatran ports worth visiting. Chinese sources record an aromatic that is usually identified as benzoin, anxixiang, by the Tang dynasty, arriving with the maritime trade through the Malay world and used in incense and medicine. Siam benzoin from Laos entered the trade later and by a different route, overland and down the Mekong.
The Islamic world
By the ninth and tenth centuries benzoin appears in Arabic pharmacology alongside storax and frankincense. It was burned as incense, added to compound perfumes and used medicinally for coughs and skin complaints. Arab and Persian traders were the link between the Malay ports and the Mediterranean, and it is their name that stuck.
Europe: pharmacy first, perfume close behind
Benzoin reached European pharmacies in commercial quantity in the sixteenth century, as Portuguese ships opened direct routes to the Indies. Pharmacopoeias took it up quickly. It was:
- a fumigant, burned in sickrooms and churches;
- an antiseptic and expectorant, in tinctures and lozenges;
- a cosmetic, the base of “virgin’s milk” (lac virginale), a benzoin tincture dropped into water to make a milky skin lotion;
- a preservative, added to fats and ointments to slow rancidity, which is why benzoic acid became a food preservative.
Compound tincture of benzoin, the Friar’s Balsam still sold today, dates to at least the seventeenth century as a wound dressing. See Tincture of benzoin.
Perfumers, who in early modern Europe were often the same people as apothecaries, valued benzoin for a different reason: it made other smells last. Dissolved in alcohol it was the fixative of choice for scented gloves, pomanders and the first eaux de toilette. When perfumery became an industry in nineteenth-century Grasse and Paris, benzoin resinoid was one of the first extracts to be standardized, and it has been in the base of amber and oriental perfumes ever since.
The modern trade
Two developments shaped the last century. Perfumery came to prefer the cleaner Siam material and drove its price up, while incense, pharmacy and flavour stayed with the cheaper Sumatra grades. And synthetic benzyl benzoate, vanillin and benzoic acid replaced benzoin in many of its industrial uses, leaving the resin itself as a specialty material for perfumers, incense makers and a small pharmacy market. Laos and Indonesia remain the only significant producers; the smallholder systems that supplied Arab merchants a thousand years ago are, with modifications, still the ones supplying Grasse.
Frequently asked questions
Where does the word benzoin come from?
From Arabic lubān jāwī, 'Javanese frankincense'. Dropping the first syllable gave Italian benzoì and Spanish benjuí; French benjoin, English benjamin and finally benzoin followed. Benzoic acid, benzene and the whole benzo- family of chemistry take their names from the resin.
Did the ancient Egyptians or Romans use benzoin?
There is no good evidence that they did. Benzoin's trade into the Mediterranean is medieval, carried by Arab merchants from Southeast Asia. Earlier 'benzoin' identifications in classical sources are almost always storax or other balsams.
When did benzoin reach Europe?
Small quantities may have arrived earlier, but it became a regular article of trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with Portuguese and Venetian commerce, and a standard pharmacy item by the seventeenth.
Sources & further reading
- benzoin
- history
- trade
- etymology
