May Chang is an evergreen

Evergreen

In botany, an evergreen plant is a plant that has leaves in all seasons. This contrasts with deciduous plants, which completely lose their foliage during the winter or dry season.There are many different kinds of evergreen plants, both trees and shrubs...

 tree or shrub 5-12 meters high in the Lauraceae family. It is native to China

China

Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...

, Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

, Taiwan

Taiwan

Taiwan , also known, especially in the past, as Formosa , is the largest island of the same-named island group of East Asia in the western Pacific Ocean and located off the southeastern coast of mainland China. The island forms over 99% of the current territory of the Republic of China following...

 and other parts of Southeast Asia. It is called "mountain pepper" (山胡椒) in Mandarin and maqaw (馬告) by the Atayal aborigines in Taiwan. As a famous spice among Taiwanese aborigines, a proposed National Park at Yilan County is named "Magao" after the spice. It produces a fruit which is processed for its lemony essential oil

Essential oil

An essential oil is a concentrated hydrophobic liquid containing volatile aroma compounds from plants. Essential oils are also known as volatile oils, ethereal oils or aetherolea, or simply as the "oil of" the plant from which they were extracted, such as oil of clove...

. The oil can also be extracted from the leaf

Leaf

A leaf is an organ of a vascular plant, as defined in botanical terms, and in particular in plant morphology. Foliage is a mass noun that refers to leaves as a feature of plants....

, but this is considered to be lower in quality. The timber is sometimes used for making furniture and crafts. Plant parts are also used in medicine.

Oil extraction

Essential oil yields from the fruit are 3-5%. The oil's primary isolate

Isolate

Isolate may refer to:* Genetic isolate, a population of organisms that has little genetic mixing with other organisms of the same species* Isolate , 2007* Isolate , 1992...

is citral

Citral

Citral, or 3,7-dimethyl-2,6-octadienal or lemonal, is either of, or a mixture of, a pair of terpenoids with the molecular formula C10H16O. The two compounds are double bond isomers. The E-isomer is known as geranial or citral A...

, at 70-85% of the oil. It is mainly produced in China from plantations and is marketed as "Litsea cubebea", with production estimates between 500 - 1,500 tonnes of oil per annum. The oil is used as a fragrance (especially in bar soap

Soap

In chemistry, soap is a salt of a fatty acid.IUPAC. "" Compendium of Chemical Terminology, 2nd ed. . Compiled by A. D. McNaught and A. Wilkinson. Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford . XML on-line corrected version: created by M. Nic, J. Jirat, B. Kosata; updates compiled by A. Jenkins. ISBN...

 and for flavouring in its own right. It is also used as a raw material by the chemical industry for the synthesis of vitamin A

Vitamin A

Vitamin A is a vitamin that is needed by the retina of the eye in the form of a specific metabolite, the light-absorbing molecule retinal, that is necessary for both low-light and color vision...

and violet-like fragrances.