What is the oldest tree in Taipei?
Taipei's oldest tree is the Great Camphor of Zhishan Rock, put at roughly 300 to 320 years depending on the source. No girth has been published to settle the exact figure, so this page carries it as a range. A local hiking record calls it the oldest tree in the city.
The camphor's age comes from two sources that disagree slightly, a Taipei heritage account giving roughly 300 years and a hiking record putting it closer to 320 and calling it outright the oldest tree in the city; neither publishes a girth, so this page keeps the range rather than a number. It stands in Zhishan Rock Cultural History Park, a hillside designated protected forest under Japanese administration, why old growth survives here when camphor elsewhere on the island was felled at industrial scale for its oil. The tree has a darker history: six Japanese schoolteachers killed in the Zhishan Rock Incident of 1895, in the first months of Japanese rule, are said to have been buried beneath it. Nothing else here comes close to that age. The Common Three Pines at National Taiwan University are estimated at under a century, arithmetic on a circa-2010 estimate rather than a fresh measurement, and the Confucius Temple's junipers carry an actual planting date, 12 March 1962, by Chiang Kai-shek himself, young but exactly dated. The Ginkgo of the Geology Building carries no age at all; circulating figures do not hold up, so the field stays empty.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.