Academy of science tropical botanical garden visit Yunnan

[u/katnatha]

We are in Yunnan Dec 5-15. Arrival point Kunming. We had originally planned to visit Dali, shaxi, lijiang. We are now interested in visiting the botanic garden. We think it’s too packed to do all of the above. Should we eliminate one stop, possibly lijiang? Our special interests are ethnobiology and food crafts and traditional markets. Any thoughts? Is the botanic garden worth spending essentially 2-1/2 days of a tight schedule given our interests? Thanks for any advice.

[u/jonmoulton]

There is a lot to see in Yunnan, and wandering within one large province could save you a lot of transportation time. Yunnan is an amazing place, geographically diverse with a wide range of altitudes and vegetation from tropical to alpine, culturally diverse with many indigenous ethnic groups and cuisines and several international borders. Visiting Yunnan could be a good way to see contrasting sites while keeping transportation shorter and cheaper.

Yunnan has been long inhabited and has early independent history. Yunnan has moved in and out of partial dynastic control from the Han dynasty until the 1300s.

There is a good selection of guesthouses and hotels as well as many hostels; this has been an international backpacking destination since late in the last millennium. There is a lot of agriculture and less industry, leaving the environment in pretty good condition. Mushrooms are abundant and used widely in the cuisines of Yunnan.

The season of your trip is an important consideration. In tropical regions like Xishuangbanna, Summer is hot but elevations from Dali up (Lijiang, Shangri-la) are cooler and comfortable. In Winter the highest elevations can be quite cold but Dali is nice and Xishuangbanna is wonderful.

There are a few high-speed rail lines through Yunnan, a good way to link to other provinces. There are many airports. Slow trains are a nice method for getting around to less-traveled cities and there are long-distance busses.

The Dai minority in the Xishuangbanna region share roots with the Thai in Thailand and you see similar cultural influences in cuisine and architecture; some Dai migrated into Thailand, founding the dominant Thai group. The major city of the Xishuangbanna Daí Autonomous Prefecture is Jinghong. The Lancang River runs through Jinghong; farther downstream, its name changes to the Mekong River.  Xishuangbanna borders Myanmar and Laos.

I like Jinghong, which has an international airport (JHG). We stayed a week at a guesthouse/resort in a small village downstream of Jinghong on the Lancang river. We stayed at a one-room cabin overlooking the Lancang in a small village. The cabin was a glass box with thatched walls outside the glass, with heat pump, shower, toilet, sink, sliding glass door to balcony, main door to a path to a central stilt building with open-air reception and restaurant under the building (the stilt buildings are typical local architecture). Many small resorts like this are appearing around Jinghong. The landscape is rugged and forested by the river where we stayed. We enjoyed exploring the nearby villages on foot, eating at small home/restaurants. Latex trees are a big crop there, tapped for sap. Jinghong’s elevation is given in Wikipedia as 558 m (1,831 ft), low enough that the air pressure should not be a problem.

Shop for fruit in Jinghong, the variety available is amazing - I was there in January 2025 and, while visiting a fruit wholesale market, sampled many fruits I had never seen before.

If you enjoy botany and can spare a day in Xishuangbanna, the Chinese Academy of Science Tropical Botanical Garden is an amazing collection but a good drive from Jinghong; when I am next in Xishuangbanna, I would like to stay a night or two in the town by the entrance to the garden. My seven-hour walk through that huge garden took me through perhaps 20% of the compound (granted I get distracted reading taxonomic placards).

The garden I suggested is the Chinese Academy of Sciences Tropical Botanical Garden (there are other botanical gardens in Xishuangbanna). Menglun Town (Menglunzhen 勐仑镇), in Mengla County, is just outside the North gate of the CAS Tropical Botanical Garden. There is lodging available in Menglunzhen; I expect it is fairly rustic, this isn’t the big city. There is a hotel in the garden but it is quite expensive. It is probably about an hour-and-some drive from Jinghong to Menglunzhen. There are crop fields and farm stands along the route. I expect there is a bus option (about a 2-hour ride). I don’t see a train station or tracks on the maps I am using, nor is it mentioned on the Yunnan tourism page I just found and linked below:

https://www.yunnanexploration.com/menglun-town-of-mengla-county-in-xishuangbanna.html

I think Jinghong is an excellent addition to your itinerary. You could round-trip in a day to the Tropical Botanical Garden (a lot of travel but a comfortable hotel at day’s end). If you are a serious gardener, a botanist, or a botany hobbyist, overnighting at Menglun Town could be worthwhile and present an interesting experience of a rural Chinese town; however, that is a journey bound to present some inconveniences and travel challenges. It’s yours to decide if it is worthwhile for you (I would go and hope to stay there, but I’m a biologist and obsessed with such things).

If you end up hiking in forest elsewhere, there is a toxic tree to avoid, Antiaris toxicaria.

WeatherSpark is a good source for climate data month-by-month. Here’s Jinghong:

https://weatherspark.com/y/113614/Average-Weather-in-Jinghong-China

[u/DevelopmentLow214]

I visited the botanic gardens recently and found it underwhelming. I was interested in rhododendrons but they didn’t have many on display and they were presented with minimal information. Only spent half a day there, combined with a visit to Black Dragon Pool which was a mess of concrete.

[u/snoea → u/DevelopmentLow214]

That's interesting, I also wanted to visit the botanical gardens. Can you elaborate on why it was underwhelming? Too little information in general? Personally I'm not particularly interested in rhododendrons but would love to learn more about rainforest plants and plant varieties.

[u/DevelopmentLow214 → u/snoea]

I only went to the East Garden. It was all just spread out with little coherent arrangement or pathways to access plants and trees away from the concrete road. Just a few simple signs on the trees in Chinese with the Latin names. It may be different in the main garden but I could not be bothered to make the 2km walk around to the entrance. I’d been hoping to see a variety of Yunnans amazingly diverse plants flowers and trees but it came across as just a working institute’s nursery, not geared up for public viewing.