The conifer genus Taiwania (Taxodiaceae) was described by the Japanese botanist Bunzo Hayata in April 1906 from material collected by Konishi in February 1904 on the western slopes of Mt Morrison (Yu Shan) on the Island of Taiwan (Hayata, 1906; Masters, 1906; Dallimore & Jackson, 1966: 582). Its author placed it near to the genera Cunninghamia and Athrotaxis, and gave an excellent figure of it (Hayata, 1907). Eight years after Konishi's discovery, in 1912, the English botanist J. H. Lace obtained a specimen of Taiwania through a Burmese collector, Maung Kyaw (Kyaw No. 52 in herb. J. H. Lace, E) about 1500 miles (c. 2400 km) west of Taiwan between Myitkyina and Hpimaw (possibly about 50 miles northwest of Myitkyina) in the Upper Hill Tracts of Upper Burma (Orr, 1933a), thus firmly establishing for the first time the existence of this genus also on the Asiatic mainland. The first botanical discovery of Taiwania in China itself is accredited to Handel-Mazzetti in 1916, who gathered plants from the Salween-Irrawaddy divide in the extreme northwest of Yunnan (Orr, 1933b). Subsequent gatherings (e.g. Forrest 17687, 20310, 21673; Rock 22132, Tu 19215 & 21038) have shown that the genus occurs in a number of isolated stations (either as scattered individuals or as nearly pure forests) along the Yunnan-Burma border and the Upper Salween River area of Yunnan (e.g. Orr, 1933b; Hu, 1934; Kingdon-Ward, 1946), where it had probably long been known by the Chinese as providing their preferred timber for the local coffin trade (Kermode, 1939). Gaussen (1939) regarded this Yunnan-Burma Taiwania as a separable species, T. flousiana. A third, greatly disjunct locality for Taiwania remained undiscovered until 1948, when it was collected in the Hupeh-Szechuan border 'Metasequoiaarea' of central China (fide Hwa 480, Cheng & Hwa 1172, K), although this locality is not mentioned by Dallimore & Jackson (1966). During the course of examination of some Chinese conifer herbarium material at Kew, a specimen of the Cryptomeria-like semi-juvenile foliage of an undoubted Taiwania was found mounted as a mixed sheet with unrelated