40 Fun Facts About Lychee

Which temperate tree, famed for its autumn colour, shares the lychee's plant family, Sapindaceae?

Maple trees sit in the same family as the lychee, making the tropical fruit a distant cousin of the tree behind pancake syrup. Horse chestnuts are relatives too.

One lychee from a 400-year-old tree in Zengcheng, China, fetched roughly how much at a 2002 auction?

About $67,000 was the winning bid for a fruit weighing roughly half an ounce. The tree, called Xiyuangualu, once supplied Qing emperors and yields only a few dozen lychees a year.

Which shaggy-skinned relative of the lychee takes its name from the Malay word for hair?

Rambutan comes from rambut, Malay for hair, after the soft spines that cover its rind. Peel one and the translucent flesh inside looks much like a lychee's.

Eaten on an empty stomach by undernourished children, unripe lychees can dangerously lower what?

Blood sugar can crash because the fruit carries toxins that stop the body making fresh glucose overnight. Investigators in India advised parents to make sure children ate an evening meal.

Lychees with shrivelled seeds, prized for extra flesh, are named after the tongue of which bird?

Chicken tongue is the growers' name for a thin, aborted seed, the result of faulty pollination. Such fruits sell for more because there is more to eat.

The floral aroma of fresh lychee, largely lost in canning, is most often likened to which flower?

Rose is the standard comparison, and chemistry backs it up: lychee flesh contains geraniol and another scent compound named after the flower itself.

Raw lychee flesh is rich in which nutrient, supplying about 79% of the Daily Value per 100 grams?

Vitamin C is the lychee's one standout nutrient, at about 72 mg per 100 grams. The flesh is otherwise mostly water and carbohydrate, with almost no fat.

Dried lychees, with brittle shells and dark chewy flesh, came to be wrongly nicknamed lychee what?

Nuts they are not: the name stuck because the dried skin turns firm and brittle like a shell. Inside is shrivelled fruit around a seed nobody should eat.

Which milder-tasting cousin of the lychee has a Chinese name that literally means 'dragon eye'?

Longan earns the name from the black seed inside, said to resemble a dragon's eyeball. The tree that bears it can top 30 metres.

Lai Chi Kok, a neighbourhood whose name literally means 'lychee corner', lies in which Asian city?

Hong Kong's Lai Chi Kok sits in Kowloon. Its 99-tower Mei Foo Sun Chuen estate was counted the world's largest private housing development when it was finished.

Which botanical term names a lychee's edible flesh, the same structure as the red cup on a yew?

Aril is the term for a fleshy outgrowth of the seed itself, so the part of a lychee you eat is not true fruit wall at all. Nutmeg's lacy mace is another.

The red rind of a lychee turns which colour in the refrigerator, although the taste is not affected?

Brown is the colour of a lychee past its showroom best, yet the flesh inside stays sweet. The skin also darkens and dries when the fruit is left out after harvest.

Dried lychee flesh turns dark, shrivelled and musky, and is eaten like which other dried fruit?

Raisins are the closest match, since a picked lychee dries out by itself and the shrunken pulp grows richer in flavour.

Which insects make up about 78% of lychee pollinators in India, working from sunrise to sundown?

Honeybees do most of the work, so growers keep hives among the trees to boost the crop. The reward is a light amber honey with a flavour like the fruit's own juice.

Which poet, exiled to Huizhou, wrote that eating 300 lychees a day would make him glad to stay?

Su Shi, also known as Su Dongpo, fell for the fruit after being banished to the far south. A celebrated food lover, he also gave his name to Dongpo pork.

Pierre Hermé's signature Ispahan macaron pairs lychee and a floral cream with which fresh berry?

Raspberry completes the trio in a dessert created in 1997 and now counted among the pastry house's icons. Its name comes from a garden flower of the Middle East.

Which caffeine-rich Amazonian seed, used in energy drinks, comes from a relative of the lychee?

Guarana seeds can hold about 6% caffeine, against 1–3% for green coffee beans. The vine that bears them is a climbing cousin of the lychee tree.

A growers' association founded in 1952 officially chose the spelling 'lychee' in which US state?

Florida's lychee growers took the advice of Professor G. Weidman Groff, who argued the spelling best matched how the fruit is named in southern China. Much of the world still writes litchi.

The lychee belongs to which plant family, whose 1,900 or so species include the horse chestnut?

Soapberry plants are named for fruits rich in saponins, which lather in water and still go into detergents and cosmetics.

Which consort of China's Emperor Xuanzong so loved lychees that fast horses carried them to court?

Yang Guifei's cravings made the lychee a byword for imperial excess, and a 2025 Chinese film comedy, The Lychee Road, retells the delivery run. She is counted among the Four Beauties of ancient China.

Which African island, where lychees are a main cash crop, began chilled shipments to Europe in 1960?

Madagascar's exporters found that fruit clusters cushioned with leaves of the traveller's tree, a native plant, reached European buyers still fresh.

Which Indian state grows over 40% of the country's lychees, including the prized Shahi variety?

Bihar's Muzaffarpur district is nicknamed the Lychee Kingdom. Its Shahi fruit, scented and juicy, won protected geographical status in 2018.

Which aromatic white wine grape, long grown in Alsace, is famous for a bouquet of lychees?

Gewürztraminer and lychees share the same aroma compounds, so the resemblance is chemistry rather than a taster's fancy. The pink-skinned grape makes white wines that are usually off-dry.

Which lychee cousin, toxic when unripe, has a scientific name honouring Captain William Bligh?

Ackee became Blighia sapida after Bligh, of Bounty mutiny fame, carried specimens to Kew Gardens in 1793. Native to West Africa, it must split open on the tree before it is safe to eat.

Lychee cake, a light sponge created by baker Selena Wong in 1988, is a favourite on which island?

Jamaica's lychee cake layers light sponge, cream and fruit, and ranks among the island's most popular cakes. The fruit is closely tied to its Chinese community.

A 1585 Spanish history of China praised lychees but described them as a kind of which fruit?

Plum was the nearest comparison Bishop Juan González de Mendoza could offer his readers, and he added that lychees never hurt anybody, however many were eaten.

In which country is a wild lychee subspecies known locally as alupag or matamata?

Philippines forests hold the wild form, whose long, spiky fruit opens to look like an eye, the meaning of matamata. It is rarely cultivated.

Which Chinese city names a district after Lychee Bay, a set of creeks flowing into the Pearl River?

Guangzhou's Liwan District takes its name from the waterway, a tourist spot of old mansions and Cantonese opera contests. Local tradition traces the bay's story back some 2,200 years.

China's worst lychee pest, shaken from trees in winter and dropped into kerosene, is which insect?

Stink bug is the common name for Tessaratoma papillosa, a shield-shaped sap-sucker with red-marked young. Feeding on twigs and flower sprays, it makes the fruit drop before harvest.

South Africa's main lychee variety is named after which island, the source of most of its trees?

Mauritius supplied nearly all of South Africa's founding lychee trees, so growers there call their main commercial variety by the island's name.

Which US state bred the 'Groff' lychee, named in 1953 for a professor who championed the fruit?

Hawaii's experiment station picked the tree from 500 seedlings planted in 1942. Most of its fruits have shrunken seeds, leaving about 20% more flesh.

Jesuit Michał Boym, whose book Flora Sinensis showed the lychee to European readers, came from which country?

Poland's Boym spent years travelling in China, and his best-known book, Flora Sinensis, was published in Vienna in 1656.

Lychee pork, a sweet-and-sour dish with no lychee in it, comes from which Chinese province?

Fujian cooks fry the pork until the pieces curl up red, like lychee skin. Legend credits the recipe to the chef of a homesick imperial consort who missed the real fruit.

A 2022 genome study traced late-ripening lychees to wild trees on which island off southern China?

Hainan's wild trees gave rise to the late varieties, while the earliest ones came from Yunnan: the lychee was domesticated twice. Later hybrids of the two lines were probably bred in Guangdong.

Lychee seedlings can take 25 years to fruit, so growers usually propagate the trees by which method?

Air layering roots a branch while it is still on the tree, wrapped in damp moss and plastic film. The new tree can fruit within two to five years.

The lychee tree's tiny greenish-white flowers, borne in long clusters, lack which usual flower part?

Petals are missing altogether, yet the sprays can reach 30 inches long and hold hundreds of scented blooms. Nectar, not show, is what draws the pollinating insects.

Cai Xiang, who wrote the 1059 Treatise on Lychees, was a famed calligrapher of which dynasty?

Song calligraphy's four great masters are usually said to include Cai Xiang. His treatise describes the lychees of his day and reports strong demand for the fruit.

The lychee cultivar Feizixiao is named after which expression of an imperial concubine?

Smile, or sometimes laugh, is how the name is translated. The cultivar itself is large, amber-coloured and early to ripen, with thin skin and very sweet flesh.

In Chinese folk belief, eating too many raw lychees brings on fever and which other complaint?

Nosebleed and fever are the warnings, yet legend tells of ancient devotees who got through hundreds of lychees daily.

A prickly nightshade with small red fruits in spiny husks is sold to gardeners as the litchi what?

Tomato is the name gardeners settled on, though the fruit tastes more like sour cherry. Farmers also plant it as a trap crop that lures potato cyst nematodes away from the real harvest.