Qual é a árvore mais antiga de Hong Kong?

A third of the King Banyan's trunk collapsed in a typhoon in 2007, and what survives is still recognised as Hong Kong's largest urban tree, a title the government gave it in 1997 after arborists put its age at around four hundred years. The tree grows above the spectator stand of a mini soccer pitch in Kowloon Park, on ground that was British military land, part of the former Whitfield Barracks, from the 1890s until 1967, three years before the Urban Council turned the site into the park itself. So the banyan is old enough to have shaded soldiers on parade long before it ever shaded families with strollers. It is currently infected with brown root rot, a fungal disease that has killed several of Hong Kong's other old trees, and sits under continuous government monitoring and treatment rather than removal, after conservation groups pushed for exactly that when the infection was first detected. Its crown still spans wide enough over the pitch to be unmistakable from the park's main path, cracked trunk, iron bracing and all, one of roughly 460 trees on Hong Kong's own public Old and Valuable Trees register.