Castanopsis sieboldii

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Castanopsis sieboldii, photographed by Marco Mussita — fig. b Marco Mussita, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180552448

Castanopsis sieboldii, photographed by Takaaki Hattori — fig. d Takaaki Hattori, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 112765111

Castanopsis sieboldii, photographed by りなべる — fig. f りなべる, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 108874237

Castanopsis sieboldii, photographed by Yoshihiro Tokue — fig. g Yoshihiro Tokue, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 108752157

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

The specimen a real sheet, in a real collection

Herbarium: The New York Botanical Garden
Accession: 4360175
Filed as: Castanopsis sieboldii (Makino) Hatus.
Det. by: not recorded on this sheet
Collected: W. T. Tsang 1932-04-29
Origin: CN
The sheet: View the digitised specimen (CC BY 4.0)

A real pressed plant, in a real collection, under the accession number above. Not an illustration of one. The holding institution does not serve this sheet’s image to third parties, so there is no photograph here. The record is real and the link goes to it. Where we hold no openly licensed sheet for a species this section is simply absent, and where a sheet never recorded who determined it, that field stays empty rather than being filled in. Roughly half of all herbarium sheets never recorded a determiner, which is ordinary.

Native range 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Castanopsis sieboldii, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Japan	JAP	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Korea	KOR
Nansei-shoto	NNS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Where it actually grows measured, from 308 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-1.7 °C	0.1 °C	11.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	26.3 °C	28.9 °C	30.8 °C
Annual rainfall	1,388 mm	1,535 mm	2,889 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	132 mm	174 mm	494 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 308 research-grade observations of Castanopsis sieboldii that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 27 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Castanopsis cuspidata f. awanoi (Yanagita) Nakai
Castanopsis cuspidata f. ligustrifolia (Koidz.) Nakai
Castanopsis cuspidata f. pluricarpa Nakai
Castanopsis cuspidata f. serratifolia (Makino) Nakai
Castanopsis cuspidata var. lutchuensis (Koidz.) Masam.
Castanopsis cuspidata var. sieboldii (Makino) Nakai
Castanopsis lutchuensis (Koidz.) Nakai
Castanopsis sieboldii f. awanoi (Yanagita) Yonek.
Castanopsis sieboldii subsp. lutchuensis (Koidz.) H.Ohba
Lithocarpus cuspidatus var. sieboldii (Makino) Nakai
Lithocarpus lutchuensis Koidz.
Lithocarpus sieboldii (Makino) Nakai
Pasania cuspidata var. sieboldii Makino
Pasania sieboldii (Makino) Makino
Pasaniopsis sieboldii (Makino) Kudo
Pasaniopsis sieboldii (Makino) Kudô
Pasaniopsis sieboldii var. pusilla Makino
Pasaniopsis sieboldii var. rotundifolia Makino
Pasaniopsis sieboldii var. serratifolia Makino
Shiia lutchuensis (Koidz.) Kudô & Masam.
Shiia sieboldii (Makino) Makino
Shiia sieboldii var. awanoi Yanagita
Shiia sieboldii var. pusilla (Makino) Makino
Shiia sieboldii var. rotundifolia (Makino) Makino

and 3 more.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.