What is the Cheung Chau Bun Festival? HK's Scrambling Competition Returns

Hong Kong’s signature Cheung Chau Bun Festival is making a return from May 5 to 16 this year!

Kicking off with a Climbing Carnival on May 5, visitors to the island can enjoy the stall games, workshops, performances, and all around fun; before the main event takes place on May 15 to 16, where nimble climbers will scale up a 60-foot bamboo towers covered in buns to grab as many delicious white peace buns as quickly as they can.

The traditional Chinese festival has been held every April or May since the 18th century, laying significance to a Taoist sacrificial ceremony. To ward off evil spirits and deities, locals on Cheung Chau Island began to participate in the festival to bring good luck to their families.

“Legends say that Cheung Chau was devastated by a plague in the late Qing dynasty. To dispel the disaster, Huizhou and Chiu Chow natives invited accomplished monks and Taoist priests and set up a sacrificial altar in front of Pak Tai Temple to pray to deities, repent and to comfort departed souls from the land and the sea,” reads an entry in the Hong Kong Intangible Cultural Heritage Database.

The bun scrambling competition requires participants to race up a tower stacked full of buns to grab and bring back as many as of them as possible, to symbolise old Southern Chinese traditions of providing food to lonely spirits on the island.

For more details on the event, click here to visit the LCSD's official site.