Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden

The Tropical Botanical Garden at Menglun is the single most worthwhile day-trip from Jinghong. The garden occupies a wooded peninsula in a bend of the Luosuo River, about 75 km east of the city, and covers 1,125 hectares of cultivated tropical rainforest, palm collection, bamboo grove, vine garden, and medicinal plant beds. There are over 13,000 species in the collection — the largest such garden anywhere in the tropics.

Allow a full day. The eastern half (the "ornamental zone") has the major collections and can be walked in three hours; the western half is genuine forest with a longer trail through it. Electric carts shuttle visitors who do not want to walk. Buses run from Jinghong's bus station to Menglun in around 90 minutes.

things to do sight nature garden
A story
The garden was founded in 1959 on an isolated peninsula in the Luosuo River by Cai Xitao, a self-taught botanist who walked across Yunnan on foot during the chaos of the late 1940s to find the right site. It is still run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as a working research institute — the world's largest tropical botanical garden — and many of the trees in the older sections were planted personally by Cai himself.

Other places in Things to Do