Cheung Chau Bun

Cheung Chau Bun Festival – Fourth Moon, Day 8

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This is one of those unique festivals that will leave you spellbound and provide lifelong memories – and it all happens on the tiny island of Cheung Chau, once home to some of the most notorious pirates in the South China Sea.

Jiao-festival of Cheung Chau: This activity has been practised for more than 100 years. Cheung Chau was devastated by a plague in the late Qing dynasty. Local residents set up a sacrificial altar in front of Pak Tai Temple to pray to the god, Pak Tai, to drive off evil spirits. The residents even paraded the deity statues through the village lanes. The plague ended after performance of the ritual. Since then, residents on Cheung Chau have organised a Bun Festival every year to express thanks to the god for blessing and protecting them. With residents' participation every year, the ritual was passed down through the generations. The festival also provides a platform for residents to perform their folk craft, such as making paper-mache effigies of deities, setting up the bamboo scaffolding of the Bun Mountain, and making handmade buns in preparation for the Bun Festival. This is accompanied by folk performing arts like Taoist rituals and music, a parade, lion dances, qilin dances and drum beating. The elderly residents participate in this festive activity with their children, preserving it from one generation to the next. In recent years, the Jiao-festival was held from the 5th to 8th day of the Fourth Lunar Month.

The weeklong festival climaxes with a large, carnival-like street procession featuring costumed children on stilts held aloft above the crowd, lion dances and other colourful participants. The parade winds its way through the narrow streets to the grounds near the Pak Tai Temple, which are dominated by enormous bamboo towers studded with sweet white buns, and where the main festivities take place. At midnight, athletes scramble up one of the towers in a contest to grab the top-most 'luckiest' ones.

One of the reputed origins of this popular festival, which attracts tourists by the tens of thousands each year, involves a plague on the island hundreds of years ago. Villagers disguised themselves as different deities and walked around the island to drive away the evil spirits responsible for the plague. Another story says the festival is part of an annual exorcism and fast.