HK Timberbank is Revealing the Beauty of Hong Kong Wood

As heavy clouds threatened rain, a few dozen people gather in a forlorn part of Yuen Long, where guard dogs cast a suspicious gaze over a muddy landscape of old lorries and half-junked taxis. They are standing next to an enormous pile of tree trunks and broken limbs, next to which lay the enormous branch of a centuries-old camphor tree. The crowd is here to understand how this arboreal graveyard is giving dead trees a second chance at life. 

A fresh-faced man dressed in crisp athleisure wear and a yellow New York Yankees cap makes his way to the front of the audience. This is Ricci Wong, founder of HK Timberbank, a social enterprise that has spent the past five years saving Hong Kong’s felled trees from the landfill. Since 2019, the company has salvaged more than 1,000 tonnes of timber, creating a unique inventory of more than 80 types of wood, including common Hong Kong species such as lychee, longan, acacia, banyans and camphor. Every so often, the Timberbank throws open its doors for a lively open house with locally-brewed beer, guided tours and a chance to see how Hong Kong’s urban forest can be used to make everything from cutting boards to fine furniture. 

It all started with Typhoon Mangkhut in September 2018, when torrential rain and winds blowing at 250 kilometres and hour knocked down more than 60,800 trees across the city. As government contractors embarked on a months-long cleanup, Wong realised with horror that most of those felled trees would simply be thrown in the landfill. Trained as an architect, Wong knew something could be done with the rich variety of local timber, which includes many varieties of trees that are not commercially harvested. After setting up Timberbank, he reached out to local arborists, who now contact him whenever a tree is being pruned or felled. That’s how Wong ended up with the enormous camphor branch that sits in Timberbank’s yard.

As the large pile of wood outside Timberbank’s workshop suggests, there are more trees being felled in Hong Kong than the company could ever possibly handle. Raw wood needs to be cured before it can be used to make anything. Left by itself, that takes roughly one year per 2.5 centimetres of wood — an almost impossible proposition in Hong Kong’s humid climate. Commercial lumber yards use wood kilns to speed up the process, and Timberbank is no exception, but its capacity is limited: the yard can store up to 500 tonnes of wood at any given time. Hong Kong’s only other commercial lumberyard, Chi Kee, closed in 2022 when the land it sat on was slated for redevelopment as part of the Northern Metropolis, a new town being built near the border with Shenzhen. (It was recently revived on a smaller scale.)

Meanwhile, more than 180 tonnes of wood waste are sent to Hong Kong’s landfills every day, according to government data. HK Timberbank is not alone in recycling it, but even the government has a limited ability to make use of felled trees. When Typhoon Saola hit last September, it produced 1,800 tonnes of tree waste, only 15 percent of which was deemed salvageable by Y-Park, a government-run facility in Tuen Mun that recycles garden waste. 

Y-Park mostly produces wood derivatives like mulch, not lumber that can be used for furniture. And that’s another challenge for Timberbank. “We have lots of timber but we don’t have much labour to make furniture,” says Wong. “It’s not an industrial process. We rely heavily on crafts so it’s very expensive.” He says the company is working on a new website that will provide a catalogue of its dry wood. “That means it won’t only be on the open days where you can come by and find some slab that is hidden inside our stock.”

For now, Timberbank relies on clients who see the value in using local salvaged wood for furniture and interior design projects. That includes the government, which has commissioned the company to create benches for the Wan Chai harbourfront promenade and for an arts festival on Yim Tin Tsai, as well as many private businesses. “There’s one upcoming project which will be the most exciting one ever,” says Wong. “It will be a fine dining restaurant renovation – a new restaurant will be opened by an existing Michelin one-star restaurant in Causeway Bay. We were asked to design and do all the interior decoration with wood.”

Each of the different local woods has its own distinct qualities. Lychee trees are renowned for their succulent fruit, but their wood is also prized by cooks for its slow-burning quality and sweet aroma – it’s a key ingredient in preparing traditional Peking duck. The wood’s density or hardness is the reason it burns so slowly, which also makes it particularly useful for tables, with a fine interwoven grain pattern providing resistance to stains. The wood from longan trees — which produce another delectable fruit — is similarly durable. 

Wong says one of the most useful species in his shop is Formosa acacia, also known by its scientific name, Acacia confusa. “It’s a species that came originally from Taiwan. It’s a fast-growing tree but a hardwood tree as well,” he says. It made its introduction to Hong Kong in the 1950s when the colonial government began reforesting Hong Kong’s hillsides, whose trees had almost entirely been chopped down for firewood during the harsh days of the Japanese occupation from 1941 to 1945. The tree grows well in poor soil and on hillsides, which made it particularly suitable to the degraded conditions of Hong Kong’s postwar environment.

Camphor — specifically cinnamon camphor, the most common type in Hong Kong — is another hardwood that is less dense and therefore easier to shape. It’s also culturally significant. “The smell of it is really popular,” says Wong. (Its aroma is herbal and spicy, making it a common ingredient in medicinal ointments like Tiger Balm.) Wong notes that Hakka families would traditionally plant a camphor tree when they had a baby girl, and when it matured, village matchmakers would know it was time to arrange a marriage. “When she was married they would chop [the tree] down and make a marriage box,” he says. “The smell would repel insects.” 

Wong reserves his greatest admiration for Hong Kong’s king of trees: the banyan. “It’s very difficult to use because some types of ficus trees do not have a real branch, it’s composed of many small branches so it’s very irregular. It’s a very particular shape but it can create a very beautiful piece. It takes a lot of design to make it usable.”

Beyond its commercial potential, Wong is using Timberbank’s stock for scientific research. In 2021, he founded a charity, the Timber Research and Education Foundation, to study things like the amount of carbon that each of Hong Kong’s trees is able to remove from the atmosphere. Understanding the potential amount of carbon sequestered by different species can be a way to fight the growth of carbon emissions. “Once we do the analysis, this will be an important tool for the government to plan for which trees to keep and which trees to plant,” says Wong.

But he is under no illusion that the situation in Hong Kong — as elsewhere — is anything but difficult. Climate change means stronger and more frequent storms, which means more felled trees; warmer temperatures are also encouraging the spread of diseases and insects that damage trees, like Phauda flammans Walker, a leaf-eating moth that is killing more and more of Hong Kong’s banyans each year. Then there’s the risk of urban development. Wong is particularly critical of the Northern Metropolis, whose development will result in the removal of 56,000 trees. “We are planting 100 millimetre saplings to replace trees that are one metre. It’s a huge step back in terms of carbon neutrality,” says Wong.

Later this year, Timberbank will host an exhibition with works by visual artists, writers and others. It’s a chance to raise awareness — and funding — for the charity’s work. And it will be an opportunity for the public to see first hand how rich Hong Kong is in reclaimed timber, if only more of it was being used. 

“The fact is that 99 percent of the timber in Hong Kong is imported,” says Wong. “We chop down trees in other countries, move them to China or Indonesia for processing, and then it comes to Hong Kong. And then we fell our trees here and send them to landfill. I just want people to see the beauty of our wood, the beauty of our species, so they want to acquire it locally rather than purchasing it from abroad.”