page_title: Lychee
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Lychee / History
caption_attribution_description: English: One of the earliest natural history books about China. Jesuit Missionary author. (obviously includes some non-Chinese {and non-floral} species)
context_page_description: Lychee is the sole member of the genus Litchi in the soapberry family, Sapindaceae.
  It is a tropical tree native to the Guangdong and Fujian provinces of southeastern China, where cultivation is documented from the 11th century. China is the main producer of lychees, followed by India, other countries in Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent and South Africa. A tall evergreen tree, the lychee bears small fleshy fruits. The outside of the fruit is pink-red, roughly textured and inedible, covering sweet flesh eaten in many different dessert dishes.
  Lychee seeds contain methylene cyclopropyl glycine which can cause hypoglycemia associated with outbreaks of encephalopathy in undernourished Indian and Vietnamese children who had consumed lychee fruit.
context_section_description: Cultivation of lychee began in the region of southern China, going back to 1059 AD, Malaysia, and northern Vietnam. Unofficial records in China refer to lychee as far back as 2000 BC. Wild trees still grow in parts of southern China and on Hainan Island. The fruit was used as a delicacy in the Chinese Imperial Court. 
  In the 1st century during the Han dynasty, fresh lychees were a popular tribute item, and in such demand at the Imperial Court that a special courier service with fast horses would bring the fresh fruit from Guangdong. There was great demand for lychee in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), according to Cai Xiang, in his Li chi pu (Treatise on Lychees). It was also the favourite fruit of Emperor Li Longji (Xuanzong)'s favoured concubine Yang Yuhuan (Yang Guifei).  The emperor had the fruit delivered at great expense to the capital.
  The lychee attracted attention of European travellers, such as Juan González de Mendoza in his History of the great and mighty kingdom of China (1585; English translation 1588), based on the reports of Spanish friars who had visited China in the 1570s gave the fruit high praise:
  [T]hey haue a kinde of plummes, that they doo call lechias, that are of an exceeding gallant tast, and neuer hurteth any body, although they shoulde eate a great number of them.
  Later the lychee was described and introduced to the West in 1656 by Michal Boym, a Polish Jesuit missionary (at that time Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth).
caption: "Lici Fruit Tree" in Michal Boym's Flora Sinensis (1657)
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