The Banyan of Nathan Road

The government's inspection of this tree reads like a description of the street it is on. Compacted soil. Cable and brace support fitted. More than seventy-five percent of the ground under its crown built over or paved. Overall risk moderate, vigour normal, which together describe a large healthy tree living in conditions no tree would choose. It stands on the Park Lane Shopper's Boulevard stretch of Nathan Road, the Golden Mile, with a trunk 2.07 metres through, nineteen metres tall and a crown spreading twenty-two metres over one of Hong Kong's busiest shopping streets. Directly opposite is St Andrew's Church, built between 1904 and 1906 in Victorian Gothic on a small rise above the road, Kowloon's oldest Anglican church and a gift to the community from Paul Chater, the Armenian-born businessman who co-founded Hong Kong Land and paid for a good deal of what the colony became. So the view is a banyan against English stonework, on a street that now sells watches and phones. The register gives no age for the tree, and no independent source names it, so what is documented is its size and its condition. It is a six or seven minute walk from the King Banyan in Kowloon Park, which makes it the easy last stop of that walk rather than a trip of its own.