The Nine Dragon Cypress

The bark on this juniper twists hard enough that people counted nine dragons in it. Hence the name, and the older epithet Nine Dragons Greeting the Sage, earned because emperors passed the tree on their way to the Circular Mound Altar for the winter solstice sacrifice. In 2018 the city government named it one of Beijing's ten most beautiful ancient tree kings. It is not a big tree. The municipal register gives a trunk 3.68 metres round, a height of 11.5 metres and a canopy only 6.7 metres across: dense and knotted rather than towering. It is graded one, the class reserved for trees over three hundred years old. Tradition puts the planting in 1420, the eighteenth year of the Yongle reign, and that is where the round figure of six hundred years comes from, an official date repeated down the centuries rather than a ring count. Read it as a wide band, not a birthday. The tree stands northwest of the Echo Wall, inside the Temple of Heaven's inner enclosure, which needs a second ticket on top of the park entry. Our pin marks the park rather than the trunk: the sources agree on the direction and none of them gives a coordinate. They also both trace back to the same 2018 municipal survey, so the figures come from one count rather than two.