The Tang Scholar Tree

The Qianlong Emperor built a pavilion so he could sit and look at this tree, then named the courtyard after it: Guke Ting, the Court of the Ancient Bole. A rockery went in beside it at the same time, partly to protect the tree. Not many trees anywhere have had that much imperial attention paid to their comfort. It is a scholar tree, traditionally dated to the Tang dynasty, which is where the figure of roughly 1,200 years comes from. That is a registered and long-repeated age rather than a fresh count, so the band around it is wide. What the municipal survey does measure is concrete enough: a trunk 5.96 metres round, 13 metres of height, a canopy nine metres across, grade one on the ancient-tree register, and a place on the city's 2018 list of its ten most beautiful ancient tree kings. The shape is the real distinction. Beijing's own description calls it a massive potted landscape, which is fair. Centuries of training have left something deliberately sculpted rather than wild, and the whole frame of it reads most clearly in winter once the leaves are down. It stands in the northwest quadrant of Beihai Park, beside the Huafangzhai pavilion, and our pin marks the park rather than the courtyard, so allow yourself a walk. The newest record we found of the tree is that 2018 survey.