Tropical hard white wood branch.

[dobermann]

I was led to a tree by a friends mother, she said the wood was used to make water buffalo harnesses in Taiwan, and the name of the tree is 9 bows tree, she told me in Chinese. I'm not Taiwanese, so battle with language, I asked a friend to check on the net in Chinese but he couldn't find much info, so I still can't work out what it is.
I'm going to check the forest for, some thicker limbs, so will take pics if any one is interested ?

I took two branch this one in the pic , and a skinny little one . After a quick dry, I chopped out a simple bow out of the little one in 20 minutes just to test if the wood is bow worthy.
I found that it's very good bow wood, the bark dries hard as a bone, so does the wood, it's hard fast.

This branch is 66'' and is about 1 1/2'' diameter all the way through.

   

[Pat B]

Possibly a eucalyptus?

[dobermann]

The bark does look like, eucalyptus, but this is not, any gum tree species as far as I know. I took some pics of the leaves, but not of the tree, I'll take pics of it on the weekend.