The Bauhinia blakeana — the Hong Kong Orchid Tree — is found nowhere else in the world as a wild species. It was first documented in 1880 near Pok Fu Lam on the western shore of Hong Kong Island, and was formally named in 1908 after Sir Henry Blake, who served as colonial governor from 1898 to 1903 and championed the Botanic Gardens. A sterile hybrid, it cannot reproduce from seed; every specimen alive today descends from cuttings taken from that original tree. When Hong Kong needed a symbol for its new post-handover flag and its new ceremonial square, the bauhinia was the obvious choice: a flower that is entirely, irreducibly Hong Kong's own, a living thing that exists only here. The six-metre golden version in Wan Chai — a gilded bauhinia flower on a red granite pillar on a pyramid — is an outsized embodiment of that local identity.

Golden Bauhinia Square exists because of a single night. The ceremonies that transferred sovereignty over Hong Kong from Britain to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997 were held in and around the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre — the curved building that juts out into Victoria Harbour like a gleaming wave. The square outside was the stage for that transfer. The golden sculpture was a gift from the central government, planted at the site as a permanent marker of the moment. Every year since, the square hosts Special Flag Raising Ceremonies on 1 July (the anniversary of the handover) and 1 October (National Day), events that draw crowds and, on National Day and the second day of Chinese New Year, fireworks over the harbour.

The flag-raising ceremonies at Golden Bauhinia Square follow a carefully maintained schedule with three distinct tiers. On ordinary days, officers in regular uniform raise the flags and play the national anthem. On the first of each month — except July and October, when special ceremonies apply — an enhanced ceremony brings officers in full ceremonial dress, a rifle unit, the Police Band, and a ten-minute performance by the Police Pipe Band. Since July 2008, the second Sunday of each month has a youth uniformed group conducting the daily version of the ceremony, introducing a different generation of Hongkongers to a ritual their city has now observed for nearly three decades. The regularity of it — every day, every morning, at eight — gives the square a pulse.

Official symbolism rarely escapes the commentary of the people it's meant to represent. Hongkongers looked at the grand golden sculpture — its petals spreading upward like a great bloom frozen mid-open — and saw something that looked, from certain angles and with sufficient imagination, like the leafy stalks of pak choi, the everyday Cantonese vegetable. The nickname stuck. It is not mean-spirited; it is the city's characteristic ability to find the human scale in the monumental, to domesticate the ceremonial without dismissing it. Golden Bauhinia Square is both a site of genuine historical weight and a place where people walk their dogs in the morning before the officers arrive.