The Rubber Fig of Lugard Road

No tree in Hong Kong's register of old and valuable trees has a wider trunk than this one, and strictly speaking it does not have one trunk at all. The register measures five metres across at chest height. What it is measuring is a crowd: aerial roots that dropped from the branches, reached the ground and thickened into trunks of their own, until the tree had grown clean across Lugard Road. The Urban Trees of the World blog described the result in 2017 as a tunnel over the road. Compare the species' ordinary numbers. The government's own plant page gives a typical India-rubber tree a main trunk 25 to 40 centimetres through. This one stands 25 metres tall under a crown 28 metres wide, and the register lists it for two reasons, large size and outstanding form, neither of which needs explaining once you are standing in it. India-rubber trees come from north-east India and South-east Asia. Their white latex was once tapped for gum on plantations around the world, until the poor quality of the rubber ended the trade. The tree became a street tree instead, because drought, shade and polluted air barely bother it. A few other big rubber trees share this hillside, but this is the one the path runs through. Lugard Road is a level footpath on the Hong Kong Trail, about a kilometre from the Peak Tram. Nobody has put a date on the tree; if you know when it was planted, tell us.