Why Hong Kong’s nature has captivated locals and visitors for centuries

Hong Kong’s outstanding natural habitat has long been a source of fascination for locals and professional botanists alike

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This old image shows Graham Heywood on a scouting mission. Photo: courtesy of the Heywood family

Jason Wordie

Published: 9:00pm, 2 Dec 2024

Plant-hunting rambles are among Hong Kong’s more unexpected pleasures. An extraordinary variety of flora can be encountered within relatively short distances – often next to to heavily built-up areas, with strikingly different discoveries throughout the seasons.

The first known European to botanise in the Hong Kong region was British naval surgeon Clarke Abel, who accompanied the Amherst diplomatic mission to China in 1816. On a scorching summer’s day in July, when his vessel, HMS Alceste, laid anchor in the East Lamma Channel, he accompanied a party sent ashore to gather freshwater supplies at Waterfall Bay. While the others were otherwise engaged, Abel followed the creek bed into the hills above the Pok Fu Lam coast on a systematic botanical excursion. By day’s end, various species of South China native orchids had been noted, along with other unusual plants that had not been scientifically documented.

Clarke Abel was the first European to botanise in Hong Kong. Photo: Wiki Commons

Other plant hunters followed after 1841, when Hong Kong became a British colony. While earlier botanising expeditions were mainly concentrated on Hong Kong Island, by the 1860s the Kowloon hills had been extensively explored. By the end of the century, the newly leased New Territories started to be documented when the first major botanical survey in the district was undertaken by Hong Kong government botanists Stephen Troyte Dunn and William James Tutcher. Their magisterial survey Flora of Kwangtung and Hongkong (1912) remains a standard reference work on the evolution of local botany, and provides fascinating snapshots of New Territories life during the region’s first years under British administration.

By the 1930s, networks of professional botanists existed, mainly through the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong government’s Botanical Department. The Hong Kong Naturalist, an eclectic periodical established and edited by G.A.C. Herklots, a reader in botany at HKU, was published between 1930 and the 1941 outbreak of the Pacific war. This journal provided a much-needed forum for other local enthusiasts with specialist interests – hiking, birdwatching, archaeology, geology and other fields – to publish their own research findings and expand upon the work of others. Timely encouragement of these communities of interest, and the broader networks subsequently developed, led to greater expansion of local botanical work in the post-war years.

Three youngsters on a World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) course in Tai Po, in Hong Kong’s New Territories, in 1995. Photo: SCMP Archives

While some contributors were more academically specialised, others simply enjoyed sharing their enthusiasm for Hong Kong’s countryside. One frequent contributor was Graham Heywood – in everyday life a meteorologist at the Royal Observatory – who also produced a slim hiker’s guidebook, Rambles in Hong Kong, published by the South China Morning Post in 1938. Practical hiking route information was interspersed with natural history details and keen observations about the areas traversed – especially in the New Territories – which offer valuable period insights into rural ways of life that have now almost completely disappeared.