Li Jiawan Grand Ginkgo King

The Li Jiawan ginkgo in Wenxian County is one of the oldest and most striking trees in China. The trunk is several metres in diameter and the interior has hollowed into a room-sized cavity, accessible through openings in the bark. The tree is still alive — ginkgos are extraordinarily resilient — and produces seeds each autumn. The scale of it is hard to convey in photographs: standing beneath the canopy, you are looking at something that has been alive for thirty centuries.

Wenxian County has other ancient ginkgos as well, and the road through the county passes several more specimens of impressive age, some in the courtyards of old village temples. The Li Jiawan tree is the most famous but not the only reason to spend time in this part of Longnan. Getting there from Longnan city requires a bus or taxi to Wenxian and then local transport to the village.

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A story
This ginkgo is so old and so large that its trunk has hollowed over the centuries into a cavity big enough to shelter a person. Local accounts record that a man once lived inside the trunk for two years during a period of local upheaval. The tree itself is thought to be over 3,000 years old, planted during the Western Zhou dynasty — it predates the Roman Empire by roughly five hundred years.

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