This plant was sold to me as Alpinia formosana and I have no reason to doubt that. The usual common name is "pinstripe ginger" because it has very smart thin pale stripes on the leaves. It is a member of the same plant family as ginger, the Zingiberaceae. It is in the same genus as the galangal, another spicy root used in a lot of east Asian cooking. This species does not appear to be used in cooking, though it does have slightly smelly tubers that, like ginger and galangal, run parallel to the surface of the soil. The leaves smell very nice if crushed, a woody, resiny fragrance that is not quite like any others I have smelt.
