Orchid Glass House, Tipi Orchid Research Centre

According to the West Kameng district's tourism page, the Orchid Glass House at Tipi was inaugurated on 26 December 1972 by Shri B.K. Nehru. The house therefore predates the research institution that now surrounds it.

Arunachal Tourism says the state government established the Orchid Research and Development Centre (ORDC) at Tipi in 1979. The Wikipedia article on the neighbouring Sessa Orchid Sanctuary instead places the creation of an orchidologist post in the Forest Department in the late 1970s and the founding of the centre in 1989. A 1994 paper in the botanical journal Nelumbo dates the Tipi orchid herbarium to 1979, when it held 2,182 specimens of 420 species, including 15 holotypes and specimens of 57 endangered orchids.

The Arunachal Pradesh State Biodiversity Strategy for 2025-2035 presents the Orchid Research Centre at Tipi as a Forest Department establishment placed under the State Forest Research Institute at Itanagar, with a role in research, cultivation and awareness for orchid conservation. The centre explores, collects and grows the state's orchids, conserves rare species and propagates some of them by tissue culture. The district page also presents it as a tourist attraction, with the orchid house as one of its main features.

The centrepiece is the Orchid Glass House. The district page gives three features: a fibreglass roof, a display gallery running around the house, and a central pond with a fountain. The roof is therefore made of translucent fibreglass sheeting rather than glass panes, although the building is officially called a glass house. Plants stand in pots and hanging baskets, and visitors move along the surrounding gallery.

The glass house is only one element of a site that tourism pages put at 10 hectares of flat ground, a figure the state biodiversity strategy of 2025 gives as 12 hectares. Two travel sites describe, beside it, four species houses fitted with nylon shade netting and climber shades, in which about 10,000 plants are grown for ex-situ conservation; two natural orchidaria laid out in the shade of erythrina and teak plantations, where wild orchids grow in semi-natural conditions; a tissue-culture laboratory; a museum with maps, photographs, charts and specimen jars; and a herbarium. The district page also names the office buildings, the orchidarium and the garden among the components of the centre.

According to the district page, the glass house holds about 1,000 exotic orchids in pots and hanging baskets, species and hybrids of Paphiopedilum, Dendrobium, Cattleya and Vanda. For the centre as a whole, travel pages mention about 10,000 plants in four species houses, while the 2025 biodiversity strategy reports 100 orchid species, 3,500 orchid plants and 3,000 hybrid plants for the centre (data from 2023).

One travel page names Vanda coerulea, Dendrobium densiflorum and Paphiopedilum venustum among the rare or endangered orchids in cultivation. The tissue-culture laboratory is said to produce between 20,000 and 40,000 seedlings a year. The herbarium, which held 2,182 specimens of 420 species in 1994 (15 of them holotypes), is reported in recent texts as holding about 2,770 specimens of 380 species. Arunachal Tourism also mentions a demonstration farm of Cymbidium hybrids for cut flowers and credits the centre with the discovery of several new species, among them Biermannia jainiana and Dendrobium kentrophyllum.

The centre stands at Tipi, on the west bank of the Kameng river, about 65 km from Tezpur (Assam) on the road to Bomdila and 5 or 6 km from Bhalukpong. A travel agency suggests allowing two to three hours.

Advice on the best season differs: October to February for the climate, March to May for peak flowering. According to the same agency, non-residents need an Inner Line Permit to enter Arunachal Pradesh. Opening hours are not confirmed by an official source.

The visit combines with rafting on the Kameng and with the Sessa Orchid Sanctuary, some 20 km away, where the Forest Department has developed trekking routes through orchid habitats.