The Five-Finger Camphor of Lai Chi Wo

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.