Feature: New Zealand city looks to returns on friendly ties with China's Kunming (2)

New Plymouth Mayor Harry Duynhoven said the two cities had a very strong links even before they became sister cities, particularly in horticulture with the Kunming Botanical Institute exchanging botanical information and plants with New Plymouth organizations.

"Given that history, I think it's appropriate that we used horticulture to signify our close relationship by building a New Plymouth garden in Kunming. Having a New Zealand-themed garden is a first for China, and it is also the first time that our native kauri tree has been grown in China," Duynhoven told Xinhua.

Among many other links, high schools in the two cities held annual exchanges and some of the Kunming students returned to study at New Plymouth's Pacific International Hotel Management School, he said.

Vast kauri forests used to cover much of the top half of the North Island, and the indigenous Maori used them for carving and building boats and houses.

Europeans arriving in the 18th Century found the kauri yielded large amounts of high-quality timber and made excellent ship masts and spars, and the decimation of the kauri forests began.

Today kauri are largely protected and the oldest surviving tree is the 1,500-year-old Tane Mahuta (King of the Forest), which is 51.5 meters tall and 13.77 meters in circumference, in the far north of the North Island.