What is the oldest tree in Seoul?
By local tradition, Seoul's oldest trees are the ginkgos at Siheung-dong's Ginkgo Tree Intersection in Geumcheon-gu, reputed to be nearly 880 years old and marking the site of a vanished royal way-station. That figure rests on oral history and district registration rather than a scientific survey, so it should be read as a well-established estimate, not a lab-verified one. The most rigorously documented ancient tree is instead the 750-year-old Chinese juniper inside Changdeokgung Palace, formally listed as a National Natural Monument.
Ask several sources what Seoul's oldest tree is and the answers will not agree, and that disagreement is itself the honest story. The ginkgos at Siheung-dong's Ginkgo Tree Intersection carry the highest number, close to 880 years, tied to a royal way-station where King Jeongjo stopped en route to his father's tomb in the late 1700s. Sources disagree on whether two or three trees stand there, and the age itself rests on oral tradition and protected-tree registration, not a forestry survey. Banghak-dong's ginkgo in Dobong-gu was Seoul's very first officially protected tree, registered in 1968 at a believed age of 830, but a 2013 scientific survey by the National Institute of Forest Science placed its real age closer to 550, a genuine and unresolved discrepancy. That leaves Changdeokgung Palace's Chinese juniper as the most defensible answer for anyone who wants a number they can trust: a National Natural Monument, formally surveyed, consistently dated at roughly 750 years across every source checked, and older than the palace built up around it.
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