About Guangxi Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences

Guangxi Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences

The Guangxi Institute of Botany is a botanical research institute jointly administered by the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). It is based in Guilin, in north-eastern Guangxi in southern China, at the Guilin Botanical Garden, and gives its address as Guilin 541006. For nine decades the institute has been the principal organisation surveying, documenting and conserving the plant life of Guangxi, a region of complex geology, diverse terrain and abundant biodiversity that serves as a vital ecological barrier for southern China. Its work combines classical plant taxonomy and herbarium science with karst ecology, the conservation of rare and endemic species, and the study of useful plant compounds. It is distinct from the South China Botanical Garden, CAS, in Guangzhou, a separate institution with which it shares a historical founder but not an identity.

Origins in 1935 and Chen Huanyong

The institute dates its establishment to 1935. In that year the botanist Chen Huanyong — also rendered Huan-Yong Chen or Woon-Young Chun (1890–1971) — founded the Economic Institute of Botany at Guangxi University and served as its first director, and he was also involved in the design and construction of the Guilin Botanical Garden, the institute's present home. Chen was one of the pioneers and founders of modern plant taxonomy in China: a leading taxonomist who was among the first academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of the first editors of the national flora Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae, and the publisher of eleven new genera and more than five hundred new taxa and new combinations, including the famous “living fossil” tree Cathaya argyrophylla. South China Botanical Garden records that Chen founded and first directed both that garden's predecessor institute and the Guangxi Institute of Plant Research, the forerunner of today's Guangxi Institute of Botany. The Guilin institute thus belongs to the first generation of modern Chinese botanical institutions created by Chinese scientists themselves.

Documenting the flora of Guangxi

Since 1935, the institute's defining task has been to establish the baseline of plant resources in Guangxi. Its botanists have conducted extensive field surveys across the whole region, in habitats ranging from tropical limestone karst and caves to subtropical evergreen forest. That patient accumulation underlies everything else the institute does: without knowing what grows where, neither conservation nor sustainable use can be planned. A 2025 review of the compilation of the Flora of Guangxi, published in the journal Guangxi Zhiwu (Guihaia), describes how the institute has “been dedicated to finding out the background of plant resources in Guangxi all the time,” and summarises the Flora project as the first comprehensive and systematic description of Guangxi's plant diversity on a large scale.

The IBK herbarium

The physical record of those surveys is the institute's herbarium in Guilin, which carries the international herbarium code IBK. Over the decades the institute has accumulated approximately 600,000 plant specimens, making IBK the largest herbarium collection for Guangxi. Herbarium specimens are the vouchers behind every floristic claim: a published record of a species from a locality rests on a pressed, labelled specimen that later researchers can re-examine. IBK specimens are cited in taxonomic papers across China and abroad, are drawn on by digital specimen platforms, and serve as the reference collection against which new collections from Guangxi's karst hills and forests are identified. Type specimens — the original material on which new species descriptions are based — are deposited at IBK by the institute's own taxonomists and their collaborators.

Flora of Guangxi: six volumes

The institute's flagship scholarly achievement is the Flora of Guangxi. Working jointly with 28 partner institutes and universities inside and outside Guangxi, its botanists completed the compilation and publication of all six volumes of the flora. The completed work records 307 families, 2,073 genera and 9,051 species, including infraspecific taxa, of vascular plants in Guangxi. The 2025 review of the project divides its long compilation history into three stages and discusses the evaluations and honours the flora received from peers. A provincial flora of this scale is a permanent reference: it fixes names, distributions and identification keys for every vascular plant known from the region, and it provides the scientific foundation for protected-area planning, environmental assessment and the search for useful plants across Guangxi.

Karst plant conservation and restoration ecology

Much of Guangxi is limestone karst — a landscape of towers, sinkholes and caves whose thin soils and sharp microclimates support an exceptionally rich and highly endemic flora, but one that is fragile and slow to recover from damage. The institute addresses this through the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Conservation and Restoration Ecology in Karst Terrain, one of its principal research platforms. The laboratory is linked with the Nonggang Karst Ecosystem Observation and Research Station of Guangxi, which supports long-term field observation of karst ecosystems; the combined laboratory and station appear as the affiliation on a steady stream of the institute's taxonomic and ecological papers. Research in this line covers the diversity and distribution of karst plants, the mechanisms by which they survive on limestone, and the restoration of degraded karst vegetation — work of direct relevance to a region where rocky desertification has been a major environmental problem.

Gesneriads and the Guilin Botanical Garden

The Guilin Botanical Garden, which the institute operates, is far more than a display garden. It hosts the Gesneriad Conservation Center of China (GCCC), a specialist centre for the African violet family, Gesneriaceae — a family in which the limestone regions of Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan form a world centre of diversity. Institute researchers such as Fang Wen and Yi-Gang Wei, working through the GCCC and the karst laboratory, have described numerous new gesneriad species from limestone hills and caves, including species of Primulina, Petrocosmea, Oreocharis and Petrocodon, and even a new genus, Michaelmoelleria, from southern Vietnam. The working method visible in these papers is characteristic: unknown plants found on field trips are brought into cultivation at the Guilin Botanical Garden, flower there under observation, and are then formally described with conservation assessments — several of the cave and cliff species are assessed as Critically Endangered on IUCN criteria at the moment of description. The garden also holds the National Gesneriaceae Germplasm Resources Bank associated with the institute, preserving living material of this vulnerable group.

New taxa and continuing discovery

Discovery in Guangxi is nowhere near finished. A 2025 general report in Guangxi Zhiwu counted 683 new taxa of vascular plants — new species, varieties, subspecies and forms — reported from Guangxi between 2000 and 2024, belonging to 85 families and 206 genera. The dominant families were Gesneriaceae, Begoniaceae, Asparagaceae and Urticaceae, and the dominant genera included Primulina, Begonia, Aspidistra and Elatostema. The new taxa are highly rare and endemic: 70.42 percent are limestone specialists, 85.51 percent are endemic to Guangxi, and 49.93 percent are threatened, including species under national and Guangxi-level key protection. Karst areas are the main distribution centres, and more new taxa have been reported from non-protected than from protected areas — a finding with clear implications for conservation planning. The report concludes that research institutes are the main contributors to these discoveries, led by the Guangxi Institute of Botany.

Useful plants and phytochemicals

Alongside taxonomy and conservation, the institute studies what useful chemistry Guangxi's plants contain. Its second named provincial platform, the Guangxi Key Laboratory of Plant Functional Phytochemicals and Sustainable Utilization, appears alongside the karst laboratory in the institute's recent publications. This line of work connects the flora documentation to practical ends: identifying functional compounds in regional plants, and developing ways to use plant resources sustainably rather than by destructive wild harvesting. The pairing of the two laboratories — one for conservation and restoration in karst terrain, one for functional phytochemicals and sustainable use — summarises the institute's twin commitments to protecting Guangxi's plant diversity and to deriving durable value from it.

Publications and scholarly role

The institute is closely associated with the botanical journal Guangxi Zhiwu, known in English as Guihaia, in which both the 2025 Flora of Guangxi review and the 2025 new-taxa report appeared, and through which much of the region's taxonomic output is published. Its researchers publish in international taxonomy journals including PhytoKeys and Taiwania, frequently in collaboration with institutions such as the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Kunming Institute of Botany. The institute has also hosted national scholarly gatherings in Guilin, including the 7th National Symposium on Ethnobotany held there in 2014, reflecting its standing in the study of how people use plants.

Place within Chinese botany

The Guangxi Institute of Botany occupies a specific and durable niche. It is not a general botanical garden nor a university department, but the regional institute charged with knowing one of China's most botanically rich provinces completely — every family, genus and species, voucher by voucher. Ninety years after Chen Huanyong founded its predecessor in 1935, its 600,000-specimen herbarium, its completed six-volume flora, its karst conservation laboratory and its gesneriad centre make it the reference point for the plant diversity of Guangxi, and a leading contributor to the continuing discovery of new plant species in the limestone landscapes of southern China.