XVI International Botanical Congess
China has an ancient geological history and rather complex and variant habitats for nourishing diverse flora and fauna. Since China has preserved abundant late Cretaceous and Tertiary components extinct from other parts of the earth, it has been called as a museum of primitive angiosperms, or event the cradle of angiosperms. The orogenic movements during the Tertiary, in particular the rise of Himalayan mountains, resulted in origins of some plant groups. The Quaternary glaciation severely affected most area of Northern Hemisphere, but the central and southern China was weakly influenced and became a refugee for plants and an important area for the origination of the temperate to cold-temperate flora of Northern Hemisphere after glaciation. Based on the theory of unity between phylogeny and plant geography, the distribution and evolution of more than fifty families or genera were analyzed, and four origins, i.e., Laurasian origin, Gondwana origin, Tethys origin and Chinese local origin, of Chinese flora were discussed. The uplifting of Himalayan mountains is critical to the diversity of Chinese flora and richness of neo-endemism. In the Chinese spermatophytic flora, the local originated species in China have a relative higher proportion.