One Tree Forest (Mangling Banyan)

The One Tree Forest, or Mangling Great Banyan, stands in Mangling Village in Jiele Township, a short distance from the Golden Pagoda. A single Ficus benghalensis has spread its aerial roots across a space the size of a small park, creating a grove that looks like many trees but is genetically one organism. The oldest root-trunk is the original tree; the surrounding columns are all later aerial roots that have thickened over centuries into trunks of their own.

Walking through the space under the canopy has a cathedral quality: the light filters through layers of leaves and the multiple vertical root-trunks create corridors and chambers. The overall shape is roughly circular, and the whole can be walked around in five minutes or explored more thoroughly in twenty. It sits beside a road in an otherwise agricultural landscape, which makes the contrast more striking — this single organism dominating a field of low-growing crops.

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A story
What appears from a distance to be a small forest is a single banyan tree, more than 900 years old, whose aerial roots have grown down from the canopy to anchor themselves as new trunks. The tree now covers an area large enough to shade dozens of people and has its own internal ecology — birds nest in the upper branches, the ground beneath is cooler by several degrees, and the tangle of roots has been colonised by ferns and mosses. It is one of the largest single trees in China.

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