Lychee
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40 free Lychee trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The lychee is small enough to hide in a fist, yet it has moved emperors, poets and auctioneers. Grown in southern China for many centuries, it has collected legends, odd nicknames and surprising relatives on its way to fruit bowls around the world. This quiz gathers the best fun facts about lychee: what the juicy white flesh really is, which familiar plants share its family tree, how growers coax a crop from a famously fussy tree, and why a fresh one never lasts long. It also covers the health warning every lychee lover should know, and the places and dishes that carry the fruit's name. It suits curious eaters, gardeners and food-quiz fans alike. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave with a few lychee facts worth repeating the next time a bowl comes round.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which temperate tree, famed for its autumn colour, shares the lychee's plant family, Sapindaceae?
Maple
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.
Q 02One lychee from a 400-year-old tree in Zengcheng, China, fetched roughly how much at a 2002 auction?
About $67,000
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.
Q 03Which shaggy-skinned relative of the lychee takes its name from the Malay word for hair?
Rambutan
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.
Q 04Eaten on an empty stomach by undernourished children, unripe lychees can dangerously lower what?
Blood sugar
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.
Q 05Lychees with shrivelled seeds, prized for extra flesh, are named after the tongue of which bird?
Chicken
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.
Q 06The floral aroma of fresh lychee, largely lost in canning, is most often likened to which flower?
Rose
Rose is the standard comparison, and chemistry backs it up: lychee flesh contains geraniol and another scent compound named after the flower itself.
Q 07Raw lychee flesh is rich in which nutrient, supplying about 79% of the Daily Value per 100 grams?
Vitamin C
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.
Q 08Dried lychees, with brittle shells and dark chewy flesh, came to be wrongly nicknamed lychee what?
Nuts
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.
Q 09Which milder-tasting cousin of the lychee has a Chinese name that literally means 'dragon eye'?
Longan
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.
Q 10Lai Chi Kok, a neighbourhood whose name literally means 'lychee corner', lies in which Asian city?
Hong Kong
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.
Q 11Which botanical term names a lychee's edible flesh, the same structure as the red cup on a yew?
Aril
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.
Q 12The red rind of a lychee turns which colour in the refrigerator, although the taste is not affected?
Brown
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.
Q 13Dried lychee flesh turns dark, shrivelled and musky, and is eaten like which other dried fruit?
Raisins
Raisins are the closest match, since a picked lychee dries out by itself and the shrunken pulp grows richer in flavour.
Q 21Which African island, where lychees are a main cash crop, began chilled shipments to Europe in 1960?
Madagascar
Madagascar's exporters found that fruit clusters cushioned with leaves of the traveller's tree, a native plant, reached European buyers still fresh.
Q 22Which Indian state grows over 40% of the country's lychees, including the prized Shahi variety?
Bihar
Bihar's Muzaffarpur district is nicknamed the Lychee Kingdom. Its Shahi fruit, scented and juicy, won protected geographical status in 2018.
Q 23Which aromatic white wine grape, long grown in Alsace, is famous for a bouquet of lychees?
Gewürztraminer
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.
Q 14Which insects make up about 78% of lychee pollinators in India, working from sunrise to sundown?
Honeybees
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.
Q 15Which poet, exiled to Huizhou, wrote that eating 300 lychees a day would make him glad to stay?
Su Shi
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.
Q 16Pierre Hermé's signature Ispahan macaron pairs lychee and a floral cream with which fresh berry?
Raspberry
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.
Q 17Which caffeine-rich Amazonian seed, used in energy drinks, comes from a relative of the lychee?
Guarana
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.
Q 18A growers' association founded in 1952 officially chose the spelling 'lychee' in which US state?
Florida
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.
Q 19The lychee belongs to which plant family, whose 1,900 or so species include the horse chestnut?
Soapberry
Soapberry plants are named for fruits rich in saponins, which lather in water and still go into detergents and cosmetics.
Q 20Which consort of China's Emperor Xuanzong so loved lychees that fast horses carried them to court?
Yang Guifei
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.
Q 24Which lychee cousin, toxic when unripe, has a scientific name honouring Captain William Bligh?
Ackee
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.
Q 25Lychee cake, a light sponge created by baker Selena Wong in 1988, is a favourite on which island?
Jamaica
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.
Q 26A 1585 Spanish history of China praised lychees but described them as a kind of which fruit?
Plum
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.
Q 27In which country is a wild lychee subspecies known locally as alupag or matamata?
Philippines
Philippines forests hold the wild form, whose long, spiky fruit opens to look like an eye, the meaning of matamata. It is rarely cultivated.
Q 28Which Chinese city names a district after Lychee Bay, a set of creeks flowing into the Pearl River?
Guangzhou
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.
Q 29China's worst lychee pest, shaken from trees in winter and dropped into kerosene, is which insect?
Stink bug
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.
Q 30South Africa's main lychee variety is named after which island, the source of most of its trees?
Mauritius
Mauritius supplied nearly all of South Africa's founding lychee trees, so growers there call their main commercial variety by the island's name.