Trees to 15 m tall; branchlets, winter buds, and petioles densely strigose. Bark black to grayish black. Branches grayish black to grayish brown, glabrescent. Petiole 0.8--1.4 cm; leaf blade elliptic, 12--22 X 4.5--10 cm, leathery, abaxially light brown and strigose on veins and sometimes with small scattered sunken glands especially towards base, adaxially lustrous and sparsely pubescent or glabrous, base broadly cuneate, margin densely ciliate when young, apex abruptly acuminate, lateral veins 7--12 per side, reticulate veinlets slender, lax, abaxially raised, and adaxially indistinctly raised. Male flowers in 2-to several-flowered cymes or panicles, 1--2.5 cm; calyx urn-shaped, ca. 6 mm, outside appressed pubescent, lobes 3; corolla outside densely appressed pubescent; corolla lobes 4 or 5, inside glabrous. Female flowers solitary or clustered. Fruiting pedicel ca. 1 cm, densely brown strigose. Fruiting calyx ovoid when young, baglike, almost entirely enclosing fruit, ca. 3 X 2.5 cm, densely strigose especially inside; lobes short, indistinct. Young berries light brown to reddish brown, ovate, 4-locular, strigose. Fl. Apr, fr. Sep-Oct.