Non-Fiction
The Stone Wall Trees of Hong Kong / Wendy Gan
Image courtesy of the author.
In July 2015, a Chinese banyan tree growing out of an old stone wall on Bonham Road in the Western Mid-levels district of Hong Kong teetered and fell across two lanes of traffic. Estimated to be about 80 years old and standing 20 metres high, it had fallen in the midst of a summer thunderstorm, injuring two passers-by. Within a week, in the interest of public safety, the Highways Department removed five more banyan trees growing from the same wall. One was showing signs of disease, and though the other four were healthy, there were concerns about their impact on the strength of the wall, and the decision was made to fell them as well. The shock of losing so quickly six mature trees in a city desperately short of greenery kick-started an unexpected surge of collective mourning. The city’s inhabitants—still reeling from the failure of the Umbrella Movement protests and the demands for the right to vote for Hong Kong’s leader by universal suffrage seven months earlier—had found in the removal of these lush trees yet another reminder of how their leaders valued sterile efficiency and order over beauty and other intangible ideals. Letters, ribbons, and post-it notes, much like the Lennon walls that adorned protest sites in 2014, began to appear on the stone wall beneath the sad tree stumps that remained. The trees were rapidly being memorialised. One particularly touching note imagined the author Eileen Zhang (who attended the nearby University of Hong Kong in the 1930s) walking beneath the shade of these banyans. The loss of the trees was not just an ecological and aesthetic blow to the neighborhood but also the severing of a connection to Hong Kong’s past.
I live near those trees. In fact, they had been part of my daily life for more than a decade. Trees at street level are rather uncommon in Hong Kong, so when I stumble upon some, especially older, flourishing ones like these had been, I pause to admire them. Though if I were to be completely honest, I have also often hurried past without even registering them. They had become just part of the background of my everyday life, a fringe of dark green obscuring grubby apartment buildings and framing a constant stream of vehicles. When they were removed, however, I felt their absence sharply. That strip where they had been looked naked; the road they had graced with their arching branches seemed harsher, greyer, grimmer. I hadn’t realised how much they softened the urban environment. I hadn’t realised how much they softened me.
*****
The Chinese banyan (Ficus microcarpa) is a handsome tree. Its leaves are small but full, of a deep, dark emerald tinge, invoking dense and verdant tropical forests. It is the roots of the tree, however, that draw and hold the eye. Being a strangler fig, Ficus microcarpa is equipped with aerial roots that, once they find soil, will lignify into woody branches. In the wild, should a seed land in a moist nook amongst the branches of another tree, it will begin life as an epiphyte. Once its aerial roots snake down and find sustenance, they take on the hardiness of wood and slowly encase and strangle its host. This process makes for a trunk that looks like musculature, bands over tangled bands of hardened roots embracing the body of the host tree. Banyan trunks are dynamic, sculptural, and enigmatic; I sense strength, movement, and urgency, and yet there is such stillness, as if that sinewy grace had been petrified in an instant. There is no doubt it is a dramatic tree. Some might even say it is a terrifying tree given its strangler habits. A swaying, uneven curtain of dark reddish brown aerial roots does little to dispel this impression. The same goes for the lignified root stands, which can grow into thickets, as if the tree had multiplied into a forest. The banyan at times has a haunted air to it.
Not surprisingly for such a striking tree, the banyan has a number of supernatural and cultural connotations attached to it. In Southeast Asia, Malay folklore associates these trees with spirits, including the dreaded pontianak, a female vampire who sometimes frightens her prey by swinging from the tree’s aerial roots. Amongst some fengshui practitioners, its gloomy aspect, with its dark and heavy crown and its hanging curtain of roots, is inauspicious. In other Chinese contexts, however, the tree is seen as a benign host for life-giving and protective spirits. In Hong Kong, shrines to the earth gods are often placed beneath banyan trees, and in the village of Lam Tsuen in the New Territories, two banyans are themselves worshipped for their ability to grant wishes to those who propitiate them. In India, where a related species, the Ficus benghalensis, is the national tree, the banyan has a religious connection: the Hindu deity Krishna is believed to have delivered a key sermon beneath a banyan tree. Its abundant shade has also made the tree a favorite gathering spot for traders and villagers. In fact, the name ‘banyan’ itself was derived from the Banians, an Indian merchant caste which often conducted their business under the Ficus benghalensis.
The more magnificent specimens of the Chinese banyan—massive individual trees that cover two acres or more of ground with their root stands—are rare in Hong Kong. There just isn’t enough space here for that kind of spread. Nonetheless, we do have a few impressive examples, most of which were planted for shade in the nineteenth century when the British were Hong Kong’s colonial rulers. Such trees are very much part of Hong Kong’s history, a reminder of a greener, more tranquil past before development transformed the city into the dense metropolis of today. Though the Hong Kong government has not been very proactive with greening the city, it has made an effort to keep what trees remain. In the government register of old and valuable trees, the majority of the some 500 trees in it are, in fact, banyans. In total, there are about 29,000—some found along the streets, some in the local parks—that fall under the care of the government.
The lopped-off trees on Bonham Road belonged to an unusual subset of Hong Kong banyans. These were wall trees. They were not intentionally planted by an urban planner intent on decreasing urban pollution or adding shade. They were, in fact, accidents of the wild. Many decades ago, a passing bird that ate a fig defecated on the wall leaving behind a seed. There was no host tree, but a divot on a ledge with a little water (and perhaps some stray soil) had been enough to encourage growth. Used to harsh conditions, a Ficus microcarpa epiphyte can take even unpromising stone for its start in life. What might seem barren to us, however, is an opportunity for a tenacious epiphyte. Indeed, in Hong Kong such stone walls have proved to be quite an ally for the Chinese banyan, but to understand how this might be, it is necessary first to grasp the geography of Hong Kong Island.
Hong Kong Island is almost all a giant hill, and the fact that buildings have not taken over the entire island is simply because the steep and hilly terrain has proven to be both an engineering challenge and cost prohibitive. What has already been built is on the flatter ground close to the shoreline, on reclaimed land, or on parcels cut out from the more accessible portions of the sloping hill. To do so, the British in the nineteenth century cut platforms of land out of the slope, stabilising each plot with retaining walls made of stone to prevent future landslides. These walls were constructed by Chinese masons with granite or volcanic blocks about 30–40 cm high and 20–60 cm wide, using native techniques that did not always require mortar between the joints. Hong Kong Island, especially in the residential area called the Mid-levels (which as its name suggests is mid-way up the hill), is dotted with examples of such walls. These are the structures that have enabled roads and houses to be built on otherwise quite unfavourable ground. These are the very walls that have become popular growing sites for the Chinese banyan.
The two essential criteria for these walls to become suitable hosts for Ficus microcarpa epiphytes are the lack of mortar (or the presence of degraded mortar) in the joints and the soil that lies behind the stone blocks. The epiphyte’s roots probe the stone surfaces and eventually find their way to the aft soil behind the wall through the joints. Once they have access to nutrients and water, the roots grow and solidify, often creating a stunning basket weave of lignified roots across the surface of the wall. It is as if the wall, created by humankind to hold back nature, has itself been re-captured by nature.
Where the earthbound specimens of banyans project an air of expansive solidity, the wall-bound trees are like lithe acrobats. The King George V Memorial Park in Sai Ying Pun is, to my mind, the best place to appreciate their airy grace. Created out of the former garden of the Civil Hospital, the park walls most likely date back to 1879, though the trees, judging from old photographs from the turn of the century, did not take up residence there till later. I suspect that during the confusion of the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in WWII, the banyans finally found a foothold there and began sprouting all along the length of the park walls. As a plot cut out of a steep hill, the park has a large flat section, bounded on its southern and eastern sides by high walls and on its western and northern flanks by stepped terraces, the result of a series of shorter retaining walls. The banyans have especially flourished on the terrace walls, allowing an admirer of the trees the advantage of studying the trees up close. If you turn to your left, you can study the frenzied weave of the roots: the thick matting at the base of each tree that acts as a buttress and the sprawl of woody, branching tentacles. Look to your right and you are level with the first branches of the trees growing out of the wall below you. Look up and you have the banyan canopy above you with the crowns of trees from both walls forming almost a tunnel. This is the closest to an all-encompassing banyan forest you can get in urban Hong Kong.
Here the stone wall banyan enthusiast can make her observations. Forced to grow out at an angle instead of shooting straight up, the trees learn the art of counterbalance. Mostly emerging from the wall at an angle of around 70 degrees with some daring to extrude at a low angle of 45 degrees, the trunks veer sharply towards the perpendicular, creating a graceful bend. For every large branch that continues to arc away from the wall, there are usually two that curve inwards towards the park. Stone wall banyans do not take on the girth of their earthbound brethren; in spite of their age, they remain slender and agile. From the right vantage point, you can see that the most beautiful trees hold their carefully poised branches out like a filigreed fan. These trees of the wall are trees of the air.
The city now cares for these banyans, ensuring they are pruned, healthy, and not a danger to the public. It might look now as if that they thrive because of us—labelled, numbered, and registered in a government database, protected and seemingly tamed—but the stone wall banyans are wild things, surviving in spite of us. I have no doubt they will outlive us. In the New Territories of Hong Kong, the Kam Tin Tree House is a reminder of Ficus microcarpa’s indomitable will to live. When a building was abandoned in the seventeenth century and never reclaimed, a banyan presumably growing next to or even on it steadily encroached upon the structure, its roots embracing and crushing the brick walls. It is a house literally eaten up by a banyan. All that is left, barring some wall fragments, is the empty space of the building’s interior preserved in the tree’s hollow centre. The message is a sobering one: when we leave this place, Ficus microcarpa will take it over without a qualm. These are life forms with their own agenda; they have no need of us. We are fortunate to share this time and space with them, to be able to enjoy their beauty and reap the benefits of their shade. But they go their own way, working around us if need be. Our control of them is illusory. If we want more proof of this, we need only return to Bonham Road today. Remember those four healthy banyans that were felled? They are growing again.
*****
Hong Kong’s official flower is the bauhinia (Bauhinia x blakeana). An endemic species discovered in 1880 growing wild on Hong Kong Island, the bauhinia tree is spindly with double-lobed leaves that are reminiscent of palmiers and purply-pink flowers that look very much like orchids. The tree itself is unprepossessing, but its parts—the leaves and flowers—are undeniably pretty. The Hong Kong Orchid Tree (as it is sometimes called), however, is sterile, unable to develop fruit or seeds. Though there are some signs that cross-pollination with its bauhinia parental species may be changing this very gradually, it is currently propagated by grafting or cuttings only. To choose an attractive-looking endemic species as your representative flower is sensible enough, but the bauhinia, with its dependence on human intervention for its continued survival, seems the least likely symbol for Hong Kong and its feisty people.
I can’t help but feel that China’s leaders would prefer Hong Kong to be more like the ornamental but impotent bauhinia. Instead, the people of Hong Kong are closer to wild, stone wall banyans: resilient almost to the point of defiance. Hong Kong can be a harsh place and you need to be spirited to survive here. There are wide differentials between rich and poor, housing is shockingly expensive, and social mobility, especially for the young, has stagnated. Politically, things are little better with democratic opportunities and outlets for dissent increasingly circumscribed. In recent years, many have plunged into despair and desperate action. Perhaps that was why there was so much upset when the Bonham Road trees were cut down. Other old stone wall banyans have been removed for safety reasons with barely an outcry, but these were different. With the Umbrella Movement protests still fresh in everyone’s minds, the felling of these felt like the premature killing of Hong Kong itself.
The 2019 anti-extradition protests suggested that there was much fight still left in the city, but as the protests turned into a dire stalemate with no good solution in sight, a shell-shocked numbness set in. I found myself then increasingly drawn to the stone wall banyans. I needed their beauty to calm my fraught nerves amidst tear gas and constant running battles between protestors and police. But as they grounded me in a more verdant reality, I also sensed their tenacity, their sheer grip on life itself. The recent imposition of a National Security Law looks to be the deathblow to many of the city’s much beloved freedoms and it has sunk much of Hong Kong in a gloomy funk. Yet when I walk amongst the stone wall trees, seeing them defy gravity and all sensible laws known to man and plant, bouncing back from adversity and even the chainsaw, I am both awed and comforted. Even if, as many fear, Hong Kong changes irrevocably with the National Security Law in place, these trees are a vivid reminder that there are always ways to make an inhospitable place home.