Discovering Yunnan's eight best-known beautiful flowers: orchid

Photo shows blooming orchids. (People's Daily Online/Li Faxing)

With generous sunshine and abundant rainfall, southwest China’s Yunnan province is endowed with rich varieties of precious flowers and plants, being home to more than 2,100 decorative plants, among which at least 1,500 are flowering plants. Camellia, magnolia, lily, azalea, fairy primrose, orchid, herba meconopsis, and radix gentianae are eight of the best-known flowers in Yunnan.

On Oct. 11 this year, the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) is scheduled to take place in Kunming, capital city of Yunnan. To better display the beauty of the flowers, People’s Daily Online would like to introduce you to the eight best-known flowers of Yunnan.

The orchid family (Orchidaceae) is the largest family of plants widely distributed throughout the world. They can be found growing in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions. There are over 17,000 orchid species worldwide and 530 of them are endemic to Yunnan.

The orchid has symbolized a sense of pure beauty in Chinese culture since ancient times, and had long been favored by the Chinese literati over thousands of years.

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Discovering Yunnan's eight best-known beautiful flowers: Camellia

Azalea, one of eight well-known flowers in SW China’s Yunnan