Deciduous dioecious trees with resinous and slightly mucilaginous wood. Leaves spirally arranged, distant on long shoots, more crowded and clustered on short lateral spur shoots; lamina flattened and broadly fan-shaped, bilobed or entire, without midribs but with numerous fine, radiating, dichotomously branched veins, petiolate. Male and female strobili on different trees. Male strobili catkin- like, in small groups of about 4–8 in the axils of the leaves or scale-leaves at the ends of the short spur shoots, among and emerging with or before the foliage leaves and soon deciduous; pollen wind-borne, without air-bladders; fertilisation by motile spermatozoids. Female strobili drupe-like, in the axils of leaves or scale-leaves in sparse groups at the apices of short shoots among the leaves, each long-stalked with two distal terminal ovules of which only one develops. Cones fleshy, orange-yellow, slightly glaucous at maturity, ellipsoid-globose, with the outer layer pulpy and odoriferous, surrounding an inner stony one.

Contains a single genus, native in China.