Madagascar is home to some of the world’s most valuable rosewood. However, in the last decade, enormous demand from China has led individuals from all over the region to fell rosewood from the forests. While the rosewood trade has been banned in Madagascar for two decades, the government has issued brief exemption periods – muddying the legal waters by allowing traffickers to claim their wood was harvested during an exemption period and therefore legal. Furthermore, traffickers continue to smuggle rosewood out of the country by bribing government officials, before shipping rosewood through circuitous routes towards China, bribing inspectors to avoid inspections and mis-labelling the containers as vanilla or other products. The rosewood can then legally enter China with the ‘correct’ documents, typically acquired through bribery, despite being illegally felled.