In Beijing’s central district, trees are everywhere. In parks, along roadsides and in courtyards inside people’s houses. Many have only been planted in recent decades.

Others – with wide trunks – have been around for centuries and are cosy to touch: you can form an arm chain around them with a friend, trace your fingers along the bark or rest your ear on the trunk to listen to the inner workings of the tree. To hug a tree is an art. This ability does not come intuitively. It must be learned.

“Hugging trees is a way of having touch in one’s life,” Xiaoyang Wong, the leader of a forest therapy community in Beijing, told me. Wong is a 35-year-old former film editor who recently retrained as a forest therapist after the COVID pandemic left her feeling alone and isolated.

At first, many people feel awkward about hugging a tree, she told me. But in forest therapies, Wong encourages people to understand the tree’s many worlds by observing it at close quarters, watching the ants and other insects as they weave in and out of the grain of the bark.

Only after being curious about it and speaking with it, she encourages people to decide to touch or even hug it. I was a natural at tree hugging, she told me. I, however, had only learned how to hug a tree from........

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