Epiphytic or terrestrial shrub or shrublet, up to 1 m, sometimes creeping or scrambling, with much branched, tough, wiry glabrous branches. Branchlets slender, tips subangular, laxly or rarely more densely clothed with +-appressed longish (1-2 mm) bristles as well as ± densely greyish to reddish patent-puberulous, or sometimes puberulous only, subdensely foliate. Leaves ovate to elliptic, variable in form, apex broad-attenuate, blunt, not rarely rounded, the terminal gland minute, base mostly rounded or nearly so, rarely (and only partly in the same specimen) cordate, coriaceous, rather stiff, old ones said to be scarlet, young ones purple underneath, glabrous, undersurface laxly set with very short blackish bristles, these caducous except their bases, entire or mostly faintly crenate in the upper half, teeth passing into fine +-caducous bristles, flat, margin not revolute, (7-)10-17(-30) by (4-)6-10)(-18) mm, triplinerved, midrib and nerves slightly sunken on both faces, sometimes +-obscure; petiole rather slender, finally glabrous, 1-2 mm. Stipule-like axillary perulae subulate, 1-2 mm, easily recognizable on the young sterile branches, ± caducous with age. Flowers solitary, rarely in twos. Pedicels +-glabrescent, 1(-2) mm, basal bracts minute. Bracteoles ovate, ciliolate, c. 0.6 mm. Calyx initially funnel-shaped, contracted in the lower part, glabrous, 2 mm, lobes subtriangular, subacute, ciliolate. Corolla short-cylindric or subcampanulate, glabrous, white to greenish or pale yellow, 4-5 by 2.5-3 mm, lobes erect, 1-1.5 mm. Filaments rather filiform upwards, gradually expanded towards the base, somewhat S-curved, glabrous, c. 2.5 mm; anthers sagittate, very echinulate; anther-cells c. 1.5 mm; tubules slender, 1 mm. Ovary glabrous; style 3.5 mm. Fruit depressedly globular, the lower half only surrounded by the bluish, not much swollen calyx, pale to almost white when ripe, c. 3 by 4 mm.
In evergreen mountain forest, moss forest, also in rather open places on crests or summits, within ericoid ridge scrub, in the Malay Peninsula between 915-1825 m, in Sumatra 950-2500 m, locally apparently rather common. Fl. Jan.-Dec.