- Plants
- ›Vascular Plants
- ›flowering plants
- ›monocots
- ›lilies, supplejacks, and allies
- ›greenbrier family
- ›Smilax

East Asian greenbrier
Smilax china
Smilax china is a climbing plant species in the genus Smilax. It is native to China, Korea, Taiwan, Japan (including Ryukyu and Bonin Islands), Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and India. It is also known as china root, china-root, or chinaroot, as is the related Smilax glabra.
From the article Smilax china on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section
Description
The stem is woody, sparsely prickly, and 1–5 m (3 ft 3 in – 16 ft 5 in) long. Petiole is 0.5–1.5 cm (0.20–0.59 in) long; leaf blade is elliptic to orbicular, 3–10 cm (1.2–3.9 in) long and 1.5–6 cm (0.59–2.36 in) wide, sometimes wider. Berries are red, globose, and 0.6–1.5 cm (0.24–0.59 in) in diameter. Kaempferol 7-O-glucoside, a flavonol glucoside, can be found in S. china.
Range & habitat
In China, S. china occurs in forests, thickets, hillsides, grassy slopes, and shaded places along valleys or streams. It is found from near sea level to 2,000 m (6,600 ft).
Wikipedia: “Habitat”
Where it lives
Recorded sightings
—
geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.
Drag the globe to turn it. Dots are where records exist, not a range map; darker means more records.
In the old herbals & bestiaries
In the stacks
Searching the stacks…
Every page naming Smilax china in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →
This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 357433.



