King Cypress

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King Cypress - rock sign, located near Bajie/Bayi (Nyingchi County)

King Cypress (genus Cupressus, also known as Great Cypress, or as Tibetans call it “the God of Tree”) is a giant cypress tree in Tibet (about 50 meters high, 5.8 meters in diameter, 0.165 acre of crown-projection-area and calculated age of 2,600 years)^[1]^[2]. King Cypress is located near the village of Bajie, about 7 kilometers from the town of Bayi, Nyingchi. King Cypress is surrounded by at least 10 hectares of ancient cypress-trees with an average height of 44 meters. King Cypress is said to be the "life tree" of Tönpa Shenrab Miwoche, founder of the Bön tradition of Tibet.

King Cypress valley of the lower reaches of the Yaluzhangbu River and the Niyang River at the latitude of 3,000 to 3,400 meters.

King Cypress tree - the oldest tree in Tibet and pehaps China.

'King Cypress Temple', from its balcony one could catch the giant King Cypress in single photo-frame see.

[edit] The Cypress' people

The 'guardian' of the King Cypress Temple, Bai Ma (local girl who may sing a Tibetan song to welcome the tourists.

In the movie - When Ruoma Was Seventeen^[3], the protagonist: 17-year-old Ruoma, is a Hani (Xjani) minority from the Yunnan province, the south-east neighbor of Tibet. The life of Ruoma was depicted to gravitate around the amusement of the tourists visiting Yunnan. At the King Cypress park, there are many girls like Ruoma. They sell Tibetan memorabilia. One of them is Bai Ma (see the picture on your left). Bai Ma's purity and beauty like the beautiful mountains and rivers that nurtured her (see the King Cypress valley on the top left), seems to have similar fate. Bai Ma's fate is bound to the visitors of King Cypress.

From the dawn of time, China's history is a story of an immense land with several diverse or unclassified nationalities numbering some 1,072,642 people. In 1949, an earnest effort to investigate and categorize minorities began. In the 1953 census, 41 minority nationalities were specified. In the 1964 census, there were 183 nationalities registered, among which the government recognized only 54. Of the remaining 129 nationalities, 74 were considered to be part of the officially recognized 54, while 23 were classified as "other nationalities" and the remaining 32 were classified as "indeterminate"^[4]. A 55th ethnic group was added in 1979^[5].