Across the Karimata Strait, in Kalimantan — Indonesia's portion of Borneo — Daemonorops resin has a parallel history.

The Dayak peoples of Kalimantan — a collective term encompassing hundreds of distinct sub-groups such as the Kenyah, Kayan, Bahau, Ngaju, and Tamambaloh — have been inseparable from dragon's blood resin for as long as these forests have existed.

The Dayak relationship with dragon's blood resin is most clearly documented in two areas: craft and construction, and the intergenerational transmission of traditional knowledge.

⊙ The Red on Kalimantan's Woven Bamboo

In Dayak culture, perhaps the most visually striking use of dragon's blood is as a natural pigment in traditional weaving and bamboo-rattan craftsmanship. The Dayak are world-renowned for their exquisite woven goods — rattan baskets (ambung), mats, and rattan textiles — all coloured with natural dyes extracted from forest plants.

Within Dayak craft traditions, red carries special cultural weight. The textile documentation organisation Threads of Life records that the distinctive red on traditional Dayak baskets is produced by boiling the emulsion from dragon's blood fruits and rubbing it repeatedly onto the outer surface of uncut bamboo strips and rattan. This is not a secondary use of the resin — it is the core method by which the Dayak achieve that particular cultural colour, a practice sustained across generations within their material culture.

⊙ An Animist View of the Forest

The Dayak relationship with nature is fundamentally animist: the forest is not a resource waiting to be exploited, but a living community composed of spirits, ancestors, and other beings. To live well within this community, humans must learn to negotiate with it. Dayak elders are living carriers of ecological knowledge — which trees harbor spirits, which areas require permission before entry, which plants must be handled with care.

Dragon's blood — a resin that "bleeds" from the fruit of a climbing rattan — naturally carries powerful symbolic resonance within an animist worldview. That deep crimson is the color of blood, of life force, of vital energy, and that is no accident. In Dayak tradition, red pigments hold protective and ritual significance. Applying dragon's blood red to a ceremonial object is never an arbitrary choice — it places that object within a symbolic context that a Dayak community can read at a glance.

For today's buyers and traders, the most practical takeaway from indigenous dragon's blood resin knowledge is this:

① Timing

Indigenous communities across Sumatra and Kalimantan understand that dragon's blood resin must be harvested at a specific stage of fruit maturity. Harvest too early, and the resin layer on the fruit is thin and underdeveloped. Harvest too late, and the fruit is overripe, the resin structure already degraded.

This knowledge isn't written in any technical manual — it lives in hands and eyes trained over lifetimes, in the instincts passed down through generations of harvesting families.

A study on dragon's blood resin extraction at varying levels of seed maturity confirmed what indigenous communities have long known: maturity at the time of harvest is the single most important factor determining resin yield and quality (Bambang W., 2010, ITTO-Philippines-ASEAN Rattan Research Project). Traditional communities arrived at this understanding through centuries of observation; modern science is only now confirming it through controlled experiments.

② Extraction Methods

The SAD community's traditional wet pounding method — beating fresh fruit to release the outer resin layer — is distinct from both the "basket shaking method" used by Sumatran village processors and industrial solvent extraction. Each method produces different yields and different quality profiles.

Research from Bireuen Regency in Aceh Province, conducted at the University of Malikussaleh (Saifuddin et al., 2017), documented the region as a centre of traditional wet extraction, noting that the maceration method used by local community processors was later studied as a benchmark for modern industrial improvements.

③ A Vanishing Advantage

The loss of this knowledge layer has very real consequences. Researcher Yana Sumarna of the Forest and Nature Conservation Research Centre in Bogor documented a troubling set of data on collapsing per-harvester yields.

This yield collapse is not solely the result of declining wild populations. It is equally the result of deteriorating harvesting practices: harvesters who, in order to quickly reach the fruit at the top, cut down the entire rattan plant — permanently destroying a resin-producing organism.

This shortcut approach — practiced by harvesters without traditional community knowledge, without any cultural reason to protect the plant — has contributed significantly to the decline.

Traditional communities with harvesting knowledge never cut down the plant. They climb, or wait for naturally fallen fruit, or work within seasonal cycles that allow the plant to recover. This restraint is cultural. It is taught. And it is precisely the kind of knowledge that disappears once communities are displaced, young people leave for cities, or external economic pressures make long-term thinking impossible.

In a previous article, we noted that Aceh's forest environment produces resin classified as "excellent" — due to its exceptionally high dracorhodin content. This classification was confirmed through private correspondence with F. Ismullah (2018) and documented in IOP research literature (Azwir et al., 2020).

But that earlier framework left one question unanswered: Why does Aceh produce such outstanding dragon's blood resin?

From an ecological standpoint, the answer involves soil composition and forest integrity. But the cultural answer matters just as much.

Aceh's interior is home to several distinct ethnic groups — the Gayo (in Central and East Aceh), the Alas (Southeast Aceh), the Tamiang, and Acehnese forest farmers — many of whom have incorporated dragon's blood resin harvesting into their traditional livelihood systems. These communities harvest within forest territories they know intimately. They know which valleys, which elevations, which water courses produce the heaviest-fruiting dragon's blood rattan.

Nearly two thousand years ago, when Pliny the Elder wrote of "Indian cinnabar," he was already describing a commodity that had travelled far from its source. By the time it reached Rome, its origins had been mythologized into battles between dragons and elephants, cosmic legends of spilled blood. The real forests, the real people, the real hands that gathered the resin — to Rome's markets, they were invisible.

The Suku Anak Dalam, the Talang Mamak, the Suku Kubu, the Melayu Tua, the Dayak peoples of Kalimantan — they are not background characters in the story of dragon's blood resin. They are the story's original authors.

The quality standards that buyers rely on, the extraction methods that researchers reference, the species distinctions that define product grades — all of these can be traced back to the deep forest, to generation after generation of people, to knowledge systems developed by communities that regarded the rattan vine as a neighbor rather than a commodity.