What is the oldest tree in Hong Kong?

By documented estimate, the King Banyan of Kowloon Park, an Indian laurel fig the government recognised as the city's largest urban tree in 1997, at around 400 years old. Local tradition claims an even older age for a camphor tree in Sha Lo Wan on Lantau Island, over a thousand years, but that figure has no scientific dating behind it.

Does Hong Kong have an official register of old trees?

Yes. The Old and Valuable Trees register, run jointly by the Development Bureau and departments including the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, has tracked several hundred protected trees on government land since 2004, each individually mapped, inspected and re-surveyed.

What are Hong Kong's stone wall trees?

Banyans and figs that took root directly in the mortar of the city's many stone retaining walls, built into hillsides where flat ground was scarce. Roots eventually spread through the masonry itself; Forbes Street in Kennedy Town, with 27 trees on one wall, is the largest example.

Are Hong Kong's old trees free to visit?

Yes, all six trees on this list stand on public land, streets, parks and village playgrounds, with no admission charge. Two, in Sha Lo Wan and Lai Chi Wo, take a ferry or a hike to reach.

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Ancient Trees in Hong Kong

Hong Kong's old trees are shaped by the same shortage of flat ground that shapes the rest of the city: banyans root straight into the mortar of century-old stone retaining walls, and New Territories villages have kept camphor groves standing behind their houses for centuries as feng shui protection. The government's own Old and Valuable Trees register tracks several hundred protected specimens by district. These six range from a wall of banyans an MTR station was rerouted to avoid, to a fig tree that grew through an abandoned seventeenth-century stone house.

The King Banyan of Kowloon Park

Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · about 400 years (recognised as Hong Kong's largest urban tree in 1997) · Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon Park

A third of this banyan's trunk came down in a 2007 typhoon, and what remains is still recognised as Hong Kong's largest urban tree by trunk girth, a title the government's own tree register gave it in 1997 when arborists put its age at around four hundred years. Indian laurel figs are common street trees across the city, planted by the thousand along roads and in parks, but almost none of them are left to grow old and wide the way this one has, standing above the spectator stand of Kowloon Park's mini soccer pitch since long before the park existed. The ground beneath it was British military land from the 1890s until 1967, part of the former Whitfield Barracks, three years before the Urban Council turned the site into a public park. The tree is old enough to have shaded soldiers on parade before it ever shaded families with strollers. It is now fighting a slower fight than the typhoon: brown root rot, a fungal disease that has spread through several of Hong Kong's oldest trees, has been detected in its roots, and the government has kept it under continuous monitoring and treatment rather than felling it, a decision conservation groups pushed hard for when the disease was first found. The crown still spreads wide enough over the pitch to be unmistakable, cracked trunk and all.

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Photo: Forz, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

The Stone Wall Trees of Forbes Street

Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · wall dates to the 1890s; several trees individually over 100 years · Kennedy Town

When engineers first drew up plans to extend the MTR through Kennedy Town, a wall of nearly thirty banyan trees stood directly in the way, and after a 2005 flash-mob campaign by the Conservancy Association, the MTR rerouted the station underneath the old Kennedy Town Swimming Pool instead and built an exit specifically to leave the wall alone. Twenty-seven Chinese banyans and figs grow straight out of three stone masonry retaining walls along Forbes Street, roots fused into brickwork some records date to the 1890s, when the street was first laid out near the American Forbes family's Hong Kong Rope Works. It is the largest tree wall of its kind in the city, out of roughly 1,200 masonry wall trees recorded across Hong Kong, and several of its oldest specimens are individually listed on the government's own Old and Valuable Trees register. Stone wall trees grow the way this dense, hillside city forced them to: a seed lands in a crack, roots spread through mortar instead of soil, and given enough decades the tree and the wall become one structure, impossible to remove one without damaging the other. That, as much as the 2005 campaign, is what actually saved this one. It stands on an ordinary residential street a few minutes from the tram terminus, walls and trees together, exactly where the fight to keep them left them.

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Photo: Fran1001hk, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Kam Tin Tree House

Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · the banyan is over 100 years old; the stone ruin it engulfs is late Ming dynasty · Kam Tin, Yuen Long

Nobody agrees on what this stone house was originally for, a temple, a study hall, a family residence, but everybody agrees on why it stands empty: in 1661, the new Qing dynasty ordered Hong Kong's coastline evacuated to cut off supplies reaching Ming loyalist rebels, and the Tang clan family who owned this house in Kam Tin left with everyone else. Villagers were kept from the coast for eight years, and by the time the order lifted, whoever had lived here never came back. The building sat abandoned long enough that, at some point in the following centuries, a Chinese banyan took root in it, and it has spent more than a hundred years since growing directly through the structure rather than around it, trunk and roots forcing themselves through gaps in the brickwork until tree and ruin became a single object. What is left today reads less like a house with a tree beside it than a tree that happens to have kept a house's walls as part of its own shape, roof long gone, window openings now just holes the trunk grows past. It stands in a public playground in Shui Mei Village, a short trip by minibus from Yuen Long or Kam Sheung Road, one of the more unusual things a seventeenth-century eviction order has ever produced.

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The Camphor of She Shan Tsuen

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · estimated 300-500 years, most often cited as about 400 · Lam Tsuen, Tai Po

Ten adults linking arms cannot fully encircle this camphor's trunk, and the tree they would be hugging predates every building in the village it half-hides. She Shan Tsuen's feng shui woodland, 5.7 hectares the government protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest in 1975, exists because villages across Hong Kong's New Territories deliberately left a strip of hillside forest standing behind their houses, believing an intact wood at a settlement's back shielded it from bad fortune and worse weather. Camphor trees anchor most of these feng shui woods, chosen centuries ago for their size and longevity rather than planted at random, and She Shan's has grown into one of the largest examples in the New Territories: a 32 metre crown, seven storeys of glossy waxy leaves, and an age historical references put between three and five centuries, most often cited at around four hundred years. Government inspectors have logged a severe cavity and dead branches in recent surveys, the ordinary wear of a tree old enough that nobody alive remembers it being young, and it remains under continuous monitoring and pruning rather than removal. It stands on the wooded slope directly behind the village, a short walk off Lam Kam Road, still doing the job it was left standing there to do.

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The King Camphor of Sha Lo Wan

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · undated; local and official tourism material claims over 1,000 years but no scientific dating exists · Sha Lo Wan, Lantau Island

Japanese soldiers cut down most of Lantau Island's large trees for fuel during the wartime occupation, and by local account, they stopped short of this one because they believed a guardian spirit haunted it and would frighten off anyone who tried. Whether the spirit or something more practical spared it, the camphor beside Sha Lo Wan's old village school survived a period when little large timber on the island did, and villagers still call it Sha Lo Wan's King Camphor. Hong Kong's own tourism authority repeats the village's claim that it is over a thousand years old, a figure with no scientific dating behind it and best treated as local tradition rather than a measured fact, though camphors are long-lived enough that a large old specimen reaching many centuries is far from implausible. What is certain is its role: Sha Lo Wan, a fishing village on Lantau's quiet north-west coast reachable by a coastal footpath or a rural kaido ferry from Tung Chung, has treated this tree as a feng shui guardian for generations, the kind of tree a village builds its sense of protection around rather than fells for a hard winter. It still stands on the government-registered slope beside the school, watched over rather than the other way around now.

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The Five-Finger Camphor of Lai Chi Wo

Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · undocumented; a mature specimen already large enough to be targeted during the WWII occupation · Lai Chi Wo, Sha Tau Kok

Only one of this camphor's original five trunks is missing, and the reason it lost that one and not the rest is the whole story: during the Japanese occupation, soldiers came to cut the tree for fuel, and Lai Chi Wo's villagers physically stood between them and the trunk. They lost the argument over a single branch. Four still remain, splayed from a shared base wide enough that the tree is simply known as the Five-Finger Camphor, and it has stood in the feng shui woodland behind this Hakka village since before anyone alive can date it. Hakka settlers built Lai Chi Wo in the 16th century, grew it to more than two hundred houses and over a thousand residents by laying the village out on strict geomantic lines, and then watched it empty through the 1960s and 70s as families left for the city and abroad. The camphor stayed, along with the rest of the feng shui wood's more than a hundred native plant species, and it has become the emblem of a rural revival effort that has slowly repopulated and restored the village since the 2010s. Reaching it means a ferry from Ma Liu Shui or a hike in from Wu Kau Tang, through one of the last intact Hakka settlements left in Hong Kong's New Territories, to stand under four fingers where there used to be five.

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Frequently asked

What is the oldest tree in Hong Kong?: By documented estimate, the King Banyan of Kowloon Park, an Indian laurel fig the government recognised as the city's largest urban tree in 1997, at around 400 years old. Local tradition claims an even older age for a camphor tree in Sha Lo Wan on Lantau Island, over a thousand years, but that figure has no scientific dating behind it.
Does Hong Kong have an official register of old trees?: Yes. The Old and Valuable Trees register, run jointly by the Development Bureau and departments including the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, has tracked several hundred protected trees on government land since 2004, each individually mapped, inspected and re-surveyed.
What are Hong Kong's stone wall trees?: Banyans and figs that took root directly in the mortar of the city's many stone retaining walls, built into hillsides where flat ground was scarce. Roots eventually spread through the masonry itself; Forbes Street in Kennedy Town, with 27 trees on one wall, is the largest example.
Are Hong Kong's old trees free to visit?: Yes, all six trees on this list stand on public land, streets, parks and village playgrounds, with no admission charge. Two, in Sha Lo Wan and Lai Chi Wo, take a ferry or a hike to reach.
More on the oldest tree: What is the oldest tree in Hong Kong? The full answer, with map and directions.
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