East Asia is an area with the richest plant species in the world, and possesses quite a lot of endemic taxa, some of witch are still at the primitive stage of evolution. This book is the proceedings of the International Symposium on Floristic Characteristics and Diversity of East Asian Plants held on July 25-27, 1996, in Kunming, P.R.China. There were more than 200 botanists from 17 countries attending this symposium. It includes 45 papers in all, discussing about the floristic characteristics and diversity of east Asia, China in particular, the systematic evolution of some important taxa in this area, and the utilization and conservation of plant resources from perspectives of geobotany, plant systematics, plant cytology and molecular biology.

One of the purposes of this symposium was to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Prof. Wu Zhengyi, the member of Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his sixty years?? botanical research. So this book includes two of his important manuscripts finished recently. In these two papers, Prof. Wu points out that east Asian flora should be treated as an independent Plant Kingdom (Realm), and that this flora can represent best the original features of seed plants before Tertiary. As far as the systematic evolution of seed plants is concerned, he considers polyphyletic-polychronic-polytopic origin in general. The origin time is in early Jurassic Period or between the Jurassic Period and Triassic Period. From a perspective of Vicariance Biogeography, it is probably related with the formation of Pacific Ocean.