The Munmyo Ginkgo

In 1519, Sungkyunkwan's head instructor Yun Tak planted this ginkgo for a very specific reason: shade for the students memorizing Confucian classics in the courtyard below, and, tradition says, because ginkgos rarely catch fire, a reassuring quality beside wooden lecture halls. Five centuries on, the tree the scholars studied under is now one of the largest ginkgos in Korea, its trunk swollen to over seven metres around and its crown spreading twenty two metres, roughly the width of a basketball court laid sideways. Look closely at the trunk and you will see it is not one shoot but several, fused: the original stem died back at some point in its long life and seven new trunks grew from the base, knitting themselves into the single giant standing today. Three club shaped aerial roots, called yuju, hang from its lower branches, a feature that only appears on ginkgos of serious age. Rare for such an old specimen, this is a male tree, so it never drops the notoriously pungent fruit that carpets ginkgo lined streets across Seoul every autumn. It stands in the Munmyo shrine courtyard, part of Sungkyunkwan, Korea's Confucian royal academy founded in 1398, meaning students have been examined within sight of this tree for as long as most countries have had a fixed capital city.