The Ginkgo Tree of Yongmunsa Temple

A king is said to have given this tree a court rank. By tradition King Sejong, who ruled Korea in the fifteenth century, granted the ginkgo at Yongmunsa an honorary third-rank title. It has kept up its end: sources put the height between 38.8 and 42 metres and the base at 15.2 metres round, which makes it the tallest ginkgo in the country by most reckonings, and South Korea designated it Natural Monument No. 30 in December 1962. Its age is argued over and nobody has settled it. Korean sources give roughly 1,100 years, the same encyclopedia entry says 1,018 a paragraph later, and specialists quoted in travel coverage push it past 1,300. Anywhere in that band means the tree was already growing when the Silla dynasty ended. Which is where the stories start. One holds that it was planted by Ma-ui Taeja, son of Gyeongsun, the last Silla king, as he walked into exile in the Geumgang mountains after the dynasty fell in 935. Another says it grew from the walking staff of the monk Uisang. Local memory has it standing through the Japanese army's burning of Yongmunsa during the 1907 uprising, when the rest of the temple went, and crying out before national troubles since. For a few weeks from late October the crown turns gold and the mountain road fills with people who drove up for one tree.