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About Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (中国科学院西双版纳热带植物园) is a research garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences on Hulu Island (葫芦岛) in Menglun Town (勐仑镇), Mengla County (勐腊县), Xishuangbanna, and a national 5A-rated scenic area.
The botanist Cai Xitao (蔡希陶) led its founding in 1959. The garden says it grew out of the new state's need to develop rubber and other tropical cash crops: Cai and a band of pioneers it calls the "collective Robinsons" (集体鲁滨逊) cleared the island by hand to introduce and domesticate tropical plants from China and abroad and to protect the country's scarce tropical rainforest.
In the 1960s the staff trialled the oil gourd, bananas as a grain substitute, double-cropped rice and balsa; in the 1970s they introduced guar and abaca, a fibre for warship cables, looked for sources of dragon's blood (血竭), a styptic resin from dragon trees, and worked on the anti-cancer plant Maytenus (美登木). Rubber agroforestry and man-made rainforest restoration followed in the 1980s. The garden became a 5A scenic area in 2011 and in 2016 won the first Fenghuai Prize (封怀奖) for China's best botanical garden.
According to its own figures, the garden covers about 1,125 hectares, holds more than 14,000 kinds of living plants counting infraspecific taxa, has 39 specialised plant areas, and keeps a patch of about 250 hectares of original tropical rainforest. It describes itself as one of China's largest and most species-rich botanical gardens, and one of the gardens that grow and display the most plant species outdoors anywhere. Its research units are backed by a seed bank, a herbarium and field stations, and it has a branch in Kunming.
What to look for
- The original tropical rainforest, about 250 hectares, with big buttress roots
- Specialised plant areas, 39 in all
- Plantings of areca palm, sisal, bamboo and giant water lily (王莲)
- Miracle fruit (神秘果) plants
- The "Walking through the Sea of Trees" (树海行) sculpture group in memory of Cai Xitao
Location & getting there
Getting to Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
- Search for 中国科学院西双版纳热带植物园 with 西双版纳傣族自治州 and 勐腊县.
Find Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden
中国科学院西双版纳热带植物园 · 勐腊县
No reliable map pin yet: search by the Chinese name.
Sources & visit information
Written from the linked sources and checked sentence by sentence against quoted extracts by a separate reviewer on 2026-09-23. Opening hours, admission and access arrangements are not covered; confirm current visitor information with the site.
Some facts checked against Wikipedia contributors, "中国科学院西双版纳热带植物园" · CC BY-SA 4.0.