Shaanxi Xi'an Botanical Garden

This guide to the Shaanxi Xi'an Botanical Garden in Xi'an starts with a strange surviving document: a 1963 contract pricing a tiny pump house down to the fen, a level of precision that raises the question of who was watching so closely. It traces the garden back to 1958, when scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences borrowed nursery land near the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and built a single mud-walled greenhouse to shelter seventeen hundred newly collected plant species through their first Xi'an winter. You'll hear how that habit of counting every yuan and every centimeter carried through the garden's growth over the following decades. Look for the plots where scientists still tend collected Qinling flora today.