What is the core logic of investing in mahogany?

Mahogany furniture is becoming more and more expensive. Owning a set of mahogany furniture has become a symbol of the status of successful people. In fact, many people know nothing about wood. They want to collect and are afraid of buying fakes, and they don't know how much a set of mahogany furniture is worth.

I have been engaged in the wood industry for some time and have a little common sense about wood. If you ask me: How to judge the value of mahogany furniture? I can only say: sorry, I really don't know.

When it comes to mahogany, we must first start with national standards. Why does the government of China need to formulate the national standard of mahogany GB/T 18 107-2000? Each kind of wood corresponds to a tree. Red rosewood is called red rosewood, white rosewood is called white rosewood, white sandalwood is called ebony, and ebony is called ebony. Everyone has his own Latin scientific name, and the wood industry also has its own standards. Why do you have to make another thing called "mahogany national standard"?

No other country in the world has such standards. What's even funnier is that there is no such word as mahogany in English. Although there is a tree named red oak in North America, and Californians will call it a mangrove, it has nothing to do with sequoia in China.

Mahogany is a concept from China's Ming and Qing dynasties, when people appreciated hard and wear-resistant furniture. Exquisite carved decoration is only valuable for hard and wear-resistant furniture. If the chair is made of pine and Chinese fir, no matter how finely carved, it can only be preserved for a few years, not to mention pine, it is difficult to carve and polish the fine effect. It is not practical furniture that dignitaries pursue, but handicraft furniture that can show their constraints. Just like women in the world don't like practical and sturdy electric canvas bags when buying backpacks, they only buy flashy LV and Chanel.

Therefore, these dense, hard and wear-resistant wood become the best material for finely carving furniture. After a period of use, this kind of wood is mostly brown, red, brown, black and reddish brown, so it is called mahogany.

Unfortunately, this kind of wood is rare in China and mainly produced in Southeast Asia. Since Zheng He went to the Western Ocean, he has been importing all kinds of wood from Nanyang. With the ancient transportation technology, the cost of transporting a piece of wood from Southeast Asia to China is very expensive, and the domestic wood is in short supply, so mahogany furniture is not very popular.

Another reason why mahogany furniture is expensive is that it is difficult to process. Ninety percent of the defects of wooden furniture come from poor drying technology. The water permeability of dense wood is poor, the outer layer dries first and then shrinks, the inner layer is difficult to dry, there is a large humidity gradient and internal stress, and it is easy to deform and crack.

For example, American red oak, which is widely used in high-grade floors, was completely unusable before the invention of modern drying technology, because it would crack on its own under the condition of natural air drying. But with a drying kiln that can accurately control temperature, humidity and water content, it can be dried in two months. If you use a higher-end RF vacuum drying kiln, it only takes one week to dry without cracking.

In ancient China, there was no such cutting-edge drying technology. What craftsmen can do is to alternately soak the wood in water, then take it out to dry, and repeat it every few days for months or even years, in order to dry the big wood without cracking. Soaking water is to replenish the moisture in the outer layer and avoid cracking due to excessive humidity difference between inside and outside. You can imagine how expensive it is to air-dry hardwood like this.

Before making furniture, wood must be dried to a suitable EMC value according to the local average humidity. This value means that when the moisture content of wood is within this range, it is not easy to dehydrate and shrink, and it is not easy to absorb moisture and expand, so water absorption and dehydration are in a balanced state.

Furniture varies from place to place, with high EMC in hot and humid areas and low EMC in cold and dry areas. For example, EMC in Beijing is 1 1.4%, Urumqi is 12. 1%, Yinchuan is1.8%, Wuhan is 15.4%, and Hangzhou is. Hohhot 1 1.2%, Fuzhou 15.6%, Lhasa 8.6%, Shanghai 16.0%, Haikou 17.3%.

With the craftsmanship of carpenters in the Ming and Qing dynasties, it is obviously impossible to achieve such precise control, so it is inevitable that there will be many cracks in the mahogany furniture of that year. Interestingly, the crack itself has become an ornamental thing, but it has become a feature of mahogany furniture-this is actually the same as some people playing with cracks on ancient porcelain.

With the technology of the ancients in China, there is no way to finely distinguish wood. What kind of wood can be called mahogany has always been vague.

Once mahogany is prosperous, it will be a huge market. Mahogany furniture employs various writers through various public relations means, and constantly creates momentum for mahogany furniture. The price of mahogany began to soar. Many wood called mahogany by China people is neglected in their country of origin, and indigenous people are unwilling to use these hard, heavy and difficult-to-process things. (In fact, American ginseng is the same. It was originally a kind of wild vegetable that Indians talked about, and was regarded as a treasure by China people. ) Spend thousands of dollars to buy a tree in Laos or Myanmar and transport it to China to make mahogany furniture, which is worth hundreds of thousands.

In the past, there was no standard for what kind of wood was mahogany and what kind of wood was not mahogany. With the development of wood processing technology, a lot of wood that has never been used in furniture has made better effects than ancient mahogany furniture. Some cheap wood looks almost the same as Ming and Qing mahogany after treatment, or even has a better texture.

As a result, people who collect mahogany furniture are angry and feel cheated. Some mahogany merchants who have made a fortune are also very angry, thinking that "unscrupulous merchants" have disrupted the market. There are tangled mahogany lawsuits all over the country.

In this case, even the China government can't sit still. According to the drafter of the national standard for mahogany, such national standards are generally put forward below, requiring the state to formulate standards, while the mahogany standard is put forward by the government, requiring a group of wood experts to produce a national standard within one year.

If I receive such a task, I will find it ironic. Mahogany is a very vague concept of collection. How can we define it accurately? If you are a wonton lover like me and like to eat wonton from all over the world, you will find it difficult to set a standard for wonton. What criteria do you use to distinguish wonton from jiaozi? According to shape or material? Although the dragon wonton in Wenzhou, the auspicious big wonton in shepherd's purse, the small wonton in Shaxian snack and the spicy wonton in Sichuan are all called wonton, how to formulate a national standard? Shall I specify the shape of wonton? Size? Stuffing? Seasoning? Topological structure? This is really too difficult.

From a philosophical point of view, it has returned to the classic debate between nominalism and realism-in fact, there is no such thing as "mahogany", but these Woods are usually called mahogany, that's all.

The drafters of the national standard for mahogany also face such problems. Here's what they did: They collected a large number of wood data of furniture called mahogany furniture in Ming and Qing Dynasties (not produced by contemporary furniture factories) and made a statistic to see what the most common wood was.

Finally, they divided the most common wood into 5 genera and 8 categories, and listed 33 species. Other trees, although the wood may be better than these 33 species, are not considered mahogany as long as they do not belong to these 33 species. The reason why it is limited to 5 genera and 8 classes is to facilitate identification, because wood can only be accurately judged according to its anatomical structure, and it is not easy to get accurate species. If species is used as the identification standard, it will bring a lot of misjudgment and controversy.

It is not impossible to be accurate. You can cut a piece of furniture and take it for DNA testing-but how many people will be willing to do DNA testing just to buy a chair? As for whether this piece of wood is ordinary Vietnamese rosewood or more expensive Lao rosewood, even DNA identification can't tell. The existing technology can't identify where the tree grows, just as it can't distinguish the hairy crabs in Yangcheng Lake from those in Taihu Lake, because they are both Chinese mitten crabs of the same species. )

The national standard of mahogany says: "It is based on simple and practical macro characteristics (such as density, structure, wood color, texture, etc.). ), use the necessary anatomical characteristics of wood to determine the genus and species. " Therefore, this national standard for mahogany is not a scientific and technological testing standard, but an appraisal standard. Just as the genealogy shows that your ancestors were nobles in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, your surname is rooted in Hongmiao.

More precisely, the standard can be renamed as "Conventional Simple Identification Standard for Mahogany Wood". If a skilled person uses other wood to process similar structures and grains and deceives the appraiser, even if the DNA test proves that it is artificial mahogany, it is legal, because the national standard is so identified.

With the national standard, is there a clear standard for mahogany? Of course not. These 33 trees are just an example. More than 33 trees belong to these five genera. If other trees belong to these five genera, they will also be identified as redwoods.

However, if the tree species meet the requirements, can it be called mahogany? Not exactly. According to industry standards, the light sapwood of the same tree cannot be called mahogany, only the dark heartwood can be called mahogany. Therefore, even if it is qualified according to the national standard, it is not recognized in the industry.

Is the national standard recognized by everyone? That's not true. Apart from experts' differences of opinion, ordinary people also have differences of opinion. Guangdong people, Zhejiang people and Beijing people have different views on mahogany. This place is mahogany, so I can't recognize it in another place. Therefore, the mahogany furniture recognized by Guangdong people may be considered as fake mahogany by Beijingers.

Therefore, as a supplement, a national standard for dark and precious hardwood furniture was issued, which listed 10 1 kinds of dark and precious hardwood furniture, including all the tree species that have been included in the national standard for mahogany, and the useless tree species that have been included in the national standard for mahogany, that is, mahogany trees are rare and precious among the dark and precious hardwood groups, but they also meet the standards for hardwood, but those that meet the requirements for dark and precious hardwood furniture may not necessarily meet the requirements for mahogany.

So some mahogany furniture you see may meet the standard of "dark and precious hardwood furniture", but it is not mahogany furniture. Although some materials may not be bad. Of course, there are some rare trees, too rare to be used for furniture, and they are not listed at all.

We might as well understand these national standards as follows: the national standard of mahogany is equivalent to the list of 985 universities, and the standard of dark and precious hardwood furniture is equivalent to the list of 2 1 1 universities.

To sum up:

Redwood is a kind of dark hardwood. It is a cultural concept, which comes from the common materials of furniture in Ming and Qing Dynasties. Due to the hype of merchants and collectors, the price soared. Functionally, mahogany furniture is not practical and maintenance is not easy.

Imitation mahogany is not complicated. The sapwood is dyed and compacted, which looks very close to heartwood. Some cheap wood can also be chemically treated and become very hard, close to mahogany. Of course, I'm not an admirer of mahogany. When I need better furniture materials, I will choose cheap compressed bamboo, that is, break the bamboo, dry it at high temperature, and then press it with a hydraulic press. Density, hardness and strength are much better than mahogany, and the lines are beautiful. I can make large flat materials without dehydration and cracking.

The skyrocketing price of mahogany furniture reminds me of Clivia many years ago. Clivia is a kind of weed that can neither fill the stomach nor be used as medicine, and its ornamental value is also very common. Even the Dendrobium flowers are more beautiful than Clivia. At the beginning of 1985, a large flower grower in Changchun and Wang Xing sold a pot of Clivia to Harbin customers at the price of140,000 yuan. At that time, 10 thousand yuan could buy a small house in the provincial capital, which means that the price of this pot of Clivia is equivalent to 14 apartment. At that time, there were 50 thousand people raising Clivia in Changchun, all hoping to get rich overnight.

After 30 years, Clivia is rarely seen on the street, but some people are still speculating. At the flower show, someone marked a pot of Clivia to 100 million or 60 million. It is said that Clivia, which offered a price of 100 million yuan, was finally sold for10 million. I think if everyone is like me, the most expensive Clivia can probably sell for 40 yuan a pot.

How much is mahogany furniture worth? If I had a choice, I would obviously choose a cheap fabric sofa with a price of 1000 yuan instead of sitting on a mahogany hard bench with a price of10000 yuan. I saw something calling myself "mahogany sofa" in a furniture store. It's just a bare bench torturing your ass. There's no soft bag at all.

Today's expensive mahogany furniture is based on a cultural belief. People believe that mahogany is precious, just like the value of calligraphy and painting banners. Regrettably, the preciousness of mahogany was an outdated concept in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and it is ridiculous to regard it as a treasure today.

When you find that mahogany furniture is just another sky-high Clivia joke, do you feel stupid at first? People who sell mahogany furniture will not tell you how high the price of mahogany is, just as people who invest in bitcoin will keep telling you that investing in bitcoin shows that you have a forward-looking vision.

Of course, people who buy mahogany furniture are rich. They want to show their taste and be regarded as educated people, not nouveau riche. Therefore, the promotion of merchants is the cultural taste of processing mahogany furniture.

The material and color of mahogany furniture determine that it will become the bottleneck of indoor collocation. When other colors are needed, mahogany furniture can't be painted with piano paint. In the end, other decoration and furniture compromised with expensive mahogany furniture, resulting in a nondescript modern apartment, just like Yat Sen wearing a pigtail suit. Of course, the writers hired by businesses will tell you that braids are a kind of cultural taste.