The Hunt for China’s Tallest Tree
Photographer Xi Zhinong on his race to find and protect some of the country’s most valuable biological resources.
A cacophony of cicadas and birdsong rang in my ears as I pushed further into the forest. The ground beneath my feet compressed under my weight as I walked, thousands of years of detritus and accumulated moss formed into a thick green rug. All around me loomed some of the biggest tree trunks I had ever seen, towering 60 to 70 meters into the sky of southeastern Tibet.
It was a little after two in the afternoon, and the golden rays of the sun poured through the cracks in the foliage, bathing the moss, ferns, and orchids in light like something out of a fairy tale. Without a doubt, this was the best-preserved virgin forest I had ever seen in my 40 years as a landscape and nature photographer.
And then, suddenly, I saw it, the object of our trek: China’s tallest tree.
At 83.4 meters, the 380-year-old Salween fir (scientific name Abies ernestii var. salouenensis) stood out even among its fellow green giants. Roughly the same height as a 28-story skyscraper, it’s not just the tallest tree in China, but the tallest yet measured on the Eurasian mainland.
The seeds of my journey into this remote corner of China lay in a National Geographic article published in 2012, which included full-length photos of North American sequoia and giant redwood trees. The photos immediately called to my mind China’s giant tree rhododendron (Rhododendron protistum var. giganteum) — the largest rhododendron species in the world. I remember thinking to myself what a shame it was that China boasts so many species of great and giant trees, and yet none of them had been photographed like their American counterparts.
At the time, we simply didn’t have the means or know-how. Some friends and I tried brainstorming potential solutions — including one terribly stupid idea involving hiring manual laborers to build scaffolding around trees in the middle of nowhere — but we eventually had no choice but to put the project on ice.
It was only in 2017, when I saw a full-length photo of the tallest trees in Taiwan (a group of Taiwania cryptomerioides, or Chinese coffin trees, known as the “Three Sisters”) that I realized our dream wasn’t dead, merely deferred. Ditching the scaffolding concept for drones, we were able to photograph a 28-meter-tall rhododendron in early 2018.
The shoot reignited my passion for tall trees and led me to launch the Scientific Investigation Into Chinese Giant Trees Project later that same year. Soon, we captured a 34-meter-tall Tsuga chinensis, or ancient Himalayan hemlock, in the southwestern city of Dali, followed by a 72-meter-tall Chinese coffin tree in the Gaoligong Mountains near Myanmar.
As our ambitions expanded, so did our team. We brought in photographers, climbing experts, and teams of scientists from all over the country, all of us motivated by the same goal: to find and document China’s tallest trees — before they disappear.
That may sound dramatic, but we’re in a race against time. We found the record-setting Salween fir thanks to a tip from a research group, who in turn heard about it from a surveyor working on a road project in the region.
Although the forest is located in a part of Tibet essentially undisturbed by human activity, that is starting to change. The day after I arrived, a scientist on our team recalled a time he had seen another grove of even taller trees in the area. By the time he was able to investigate, however, the grove had disappeared; in its place was a cement mixing site.
These trees are some of China’s most precious natural assets, but because this area hasn’t been classified as a nature reserve, conservation isn’t on anyone’s agenda.
That’s forcing us to act fast, or as fast as we can, anyway. This particular Salween grove first popped up on our radar in 2019, but because of the inaccessibility of the area and the pandemic, we were only able to follow up on the tip in August of this year. The measuring process took us all of four days.
For all of the technological advances of the past few decades, the tree measurement process is surprisingly straightforward. To get a truly accurate measurement, we called on expert climbers to scale the tree and release a 100-meter metal measuring tape from its peak.
Much like mountain climbing, we first needed to identify the best path up the tree for the climber to follow. Because nails would have damaged the tree trunk, our team instead used a catapult to launch ropes over thirty meters into the tree’s branches. Once there, the climbers needed to find sufficiently thick branches to cling onto before they could go any higher. If they hit a dead end, they had to shimmy back down to find another route up the tree.
The photographic process wasn’t any easier, especially as this particular specimen was surrounded by others almost equal to it in size. We used a drone to snap photos every few meters. From the forest floor to the top of the tree, we took more than 160 photos, which we then pieced together to produce one full-length image.
While there’s something gratifying about the hunt, our search isn’t just about rewriting the record book. Tall trees are invaluable sources of information about the natural environment. We discovered more than 50 species of higher plants growing on the body of the Salween, including Cymbidium hookerianum, a nationally protected species of orchid. The scientists we work with estimate the surrounding region may have the greatest density of biological information per square meter of any forest in China. A few even think that there may be trees over 100 meters tall in this area. For context, the world’s tallest living tree is a giant redwood standing almost 116 meters in height.
When we found the 72-meter-tall Chinese coffin tree in the Gaoligong Mountains last year, I remember saying to myself: Will we ever find a taller tree? I never expected to break the record just a few months later. The Salween fir we measured is still sprouting new leaves and branches. Perhaps the next time we visit, it will have grown higher still. Or maybe we’ll find another grove with even taller trees. There’s only one way to find out.
Xi Zhinong with contributions from Wang Zi of The Chinese Academy of Sciences and Zhong Xin of the Shanghai Chenshan Botanical Garden.
As told to Sixth Tone’s Cai Yiwen.
Translator: Lewis Wright; editor: Kilian O’Donnell; design and visuals: Fu Xiaofan and Ji Guoliang.
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