About Cheung Chau Bun Festival

Cheung Chau Bun Festival

The Cheung Chau Bun Festival, formally known as the Cheung Chau Jiao Festival and also called the Cheung Chau Da Jiu Festival, is a traditional Taoist festival held annually on Cheung Chau island in Hong Kong. Centred on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month, usually in May, it is the island's Tai Ping Ching Chiu rite, a thanksgiving service for peace honouring the deity Pak Tai at the Pak Tai Temple. Its signature elements — the Piu Sik, or Floating Colours, Parade of costumed children, Cantonese opera and religious rites, a period of vegetarian observance, and the Bun Scrambling Competition in which climbers scale a tower covered in buns — have made it one of Hong Kong's best-known folk festivals and, in the words of the Hong Kong government, a showcase of the island's folk crafts and performing arts.

The festival is practised for more than a century and held from the fifth to the ninth days of the fourth lunar month each year. Although its main day coincides with the Birthday of the Buddha, which is a public holiday in Hong Kong, the festival itself is a Taoist rite and is unrelated to Buddha's Birthday. It draws tens of thousands of visitors to the small island each year. The Leisure and Cultural Services Department, which jointly organises the modern Bun Carnival with the Hong Kong Cheung Chau Bun Festival Committee, maintains the festival's official Bun Carnival site, and official information for visitors is published through that channel.

Origins in Plague and the Pak Tai Tradition

Island tradition traces the rite to a plague in the late Qing dynasty, after which residents paraded Pak Tai's statue to expel evil spirits. Accounts retold by the Hong Kong Tourism Board tradition, tourism guides and heritage sources agree on the core story: a devastating plague confronted the small island, islanders built an altar in front of the Pak Tai Temple and petitioned the god Pak Tai to drive off the evil spirits surrounding the island, while parading statues of deities through the narrow lanes of their village. The plague ended after the performance of these Taoist rituals, and the rites continued as an annual thanksgiving.

Some retellings date the plague episode to 1894, and others connect the island's troubles in the period to pirates as well as disease, with fishermen seeking Pak Tai's protection on both counts. Heritage research adds a further layer to the origin story. Research documented by Hong Kong Baptist University's traditional handicraft project records a narrative in local literature that the Jiao ceremony originated at Tai Ping Shan on Hong Kong Island, where a Jiao was held at the Pak Tai Temple there to pass the spirits of the deceased and purify a plague, and that Hailufeng clansmen later brought the ceremony to Cheung Chau, hosting it around Pak She Street. In that account the islanders held a Parade of the Gods, with Pak Tai leading representations of the island's other deities through the streets. The festival's purpose, as the Hong Kong government summarised it for a 2024 stamp issue, is for Cheung Chau residents to express gratitude to Pak Tai for dispelling disasters and blessing the local community with peace.

Pak Tai Temple, the Festival's Centre

The festival is centred on the Pak Tai Temple, also known as Yuk Hui Temple, on Cheung Chau. The Chinese Temples Committee records that the temple was built in 1783, in the 48th year of the Qianlong reign, when Huizhou people led by Lam Yuk-mo built it in honour of Pak Tai, and that it is now listed as a Grade 1 historical building by the Antiquities Advisory Committee. Pak Tai, a sea divinity, became the patron deity of the island's first settlers, fishermen from Huizhou, Guangzhou and Chaozhou, and remains the main deity of the temple. The temple also houses Tai Sui, Kwun Yum and Tin Hau, among other deities.

One temple tradition links the building directly to the plague story: after a severe outbreak in 1777, a Huizhou worshipper brought a statue of Pak Tai to the island, the pestilence is said to have disappeared, and residents built the temple in gratitude, completing it in 1783. Whatever the precise sequence, the temple ground and the playground and soccer pitch beside it form the festival's physical heart: the open space outside the temple hosts the procession, theatrical performances and the bun towers, and the soccer pitch of the Pak Tai Temple Playground is where the modern Bun Scrambling Final is staged at midnight.

The Jiao Rite and the Festival Calendar

Cheung Chau's celebration is a Jiao festival — Da Jiu in Cantonese — a Taoist memorial and purification ceremony found in many Hong Kong villages, of which the Cheung Chau Jiao Festival is the most prominent. Hongkong Post, announcing its 2024 special stamp issue on the festival, described it as held from the fifth to ninth days of the fourth lunar month every year and practised for more than a century, showcasing folk crafts and folk performing arts such as the unicorn dance, gongs and drums and the Piu Sik Parade.

The main day is the eighth day of the fourth lunar month. In modern editions the Piu Sik Parade takes place in the afternoon of that day, typically starting around 2 p.m. and lasting about two hours, and the Bun Scrambling Final follows late that night, running from 11.30 p.m. to 12.45 a.m. into the next day. The wider Bun Carnival organised around the rite extends beyond the religious core, with a Climbing Carnival held in advance — in 2025 on 27 April at the soccer pitch of the Pak Tai Temple Playground, with handicraft workshops, performances and mini bun-scrambling games — and with selection contests and training held weeks before the final. The festival date itself has an element of divination in its modern history: after the Hong Kong government set Buddha's Birthday as a public holiday in 1999-era arrangements following the 1997 handover, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month was selected for the Bun Festival through moon-block divination in 2001, aligning the rite with the holiday.

The Piu Sik Parade: Floating Colours

The Piu Sik Parade, or Floating Colours Parade, is one of the festival's two great highlights. Young children dressed as mythological characters, historical figures or newsmakers of the day are carried through the streets on mobile stages about two metres high, appearing to float in mid-air. The effect is achieved by a concealed supporting steel frame, known as the sik kang, with a small seat hidden between the child and the platform; because the support is ingeniously hidden, the children — known as sik sam — seem to float, giving the parade its name. Because of the frame's limited load-bearing capacity, the child performers generally weigh no more than 40 pounds, are under 100 centimetres in height, and are typically aged four to seven.

The parade is organised by Cheung Chau's neighbourhood, or kaifong, associations, which compete in creativity in designing each year's floats, often adding satire or social commentary through the figures chosen. Hong Kong Memory, the city's digital heritage archive, records that the floats are said to date to the early 1920s, when two kaifong associations introduced floats made in Foshan, Guangdong, to the street parades and others soon followed. University research similarly dates the introduction of Piu Sik to roughly ninety years ago, after a Cheung Chau inhabitant saw a Piu Sik parade on a trip to Foshan and introduced it to the festival. The modern parade proceeds through Cheung Chau's small, narrow lanes with more than 20 decorated floats in some editions, together with lion dancers, musicians and acrobats, and competition to take part is keen: reporting on the parade notes that around 300 people compete to be performers in the Floating Colours Parade. The parade is understood as a re-enactment of the original procession of deities held to drive away the plague.

The Buns and the Bun Towers

The festival's namesake food is the Ping On bun — literally a bun of peace and safety — a steamed bun traditionally filled with lotus seed paste and stamped on top with a pink character. During the festival, large towers known as bun mountains are erected near the Pak Tai Temple and covered in buns. Traditional accounts describe three large bamboo towers, up to about 60 feet high in older descriptions, covered with freshly steamed buns supplied by local bakeries, made from white flour and yeast dough with sweet fillings. The buns carried both a ritual and a popular meaning: they were offerings to appease gods and spirits, and in the popular scramble the higher a bun sat on the tower, the greater the luck it was believed to bring, which is why climbers raced to the top.

In the modern competition the tower is a 14-metre structure covered with more than 9,000 buns — in the contemporary format, imitation buns — and divided into zones carrying different scores, with buns near the top carrying the highest value. The shift from real steamed buns on bamboo to a purpose-built structure reflects the festival's difficult modern history, described in the next section, but the symbolism is unchanged: the contestant who collects the buns is collecting good fortune, and the separate prize for gathering the most buns is called Full Pockets of Lucky Buns.

Collapse in 1978, Ban and Revival in 2005

The traditional scramble was an unstructured midnight rush in which men raced up the bamboo towers with no safety equipment. In 1978 a bun tower collapsed, injuring climbers — one widely reported figure is around 100 people injured, another that about thirty climbers were injured — and the scramble was banned. The ban lasted 27 years. The competition was revived in 2005 in a safer steel-frame format, jointly organised by the Hong Kong Cheung Chau Bun Festival Committee and the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, with climbers using harnesses and a formal structure of training, selection and a final.

The revived competition is therefore both a folk spectacle and a regulated sporting event. Admission to watch the final is by free ticket in recent editions, distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, and the contest itself is scored rather than a free-for-all: finalists scramble within a time limit — three minutes in documented editions — to collect buns worth different points according to their position on the tower, and the highest total score wins.

How the Modern Bun Scrambling Competition Works

The Leisure and Cultural Services Department's published arrangements for the competition show a consistent structure across recent editions, including 2025 and 2026. The competition comprises three stages: training, a selection contest and the final. Members of the public aged 18 or above who are physically fit may enrol; entry is capped at 200 participants, with places allocated by electronic ballot through the government's SmartPLAY system. Only applicants who complete mandatory safety training sessions on bun tower climbing and prevention of falls are eligible for the selection contest.

The selection contest is held in two rounds on a single day. The 24 contestants recording the fastest times in the preliminary round — including no fewer than six female participants — advance to a semi-final the same day, competing for 12 finalist places, including no fewer than three female finalists. The 12 finalists then contest the Bun Scrambling Final at the soccer pitch of the Pak Tai Temple Playground, from 11.30 p.m. on the festival's main day to 12.45 a.m. the next morning. All 12 compete in the same race, scrambling for buns carrying different scores at different points on the tower within the time limit. Trophies go to the champion and the first and second runners-up in the men's division and to the champion in the women's division, and the contestant who bags the highest number of buns receives the Full Pockets of Lucky Buns prize. An invitation relay has traditionally followed the individual competition. Since 2016, to acknowledge outstanding achievement, any athlete who has been champion three times in the competition is named King of Kings or Queen of Queens and awarded a trophy.

Vegetarian Observance, Opera and Island Life

For islanders, the festival is not only spectacle but observance. During the festival the island observes a three-day vegetarian tradition: residents purify themselves with vegetarian eating, fishermen traditionally cease fishing, and restaurants and food stalls across Cheung Chau serve vegetarian food — dishes built on bean curd, vegetarian spring rolls, mushroom stews and tofu preparations are documented festival fare, and even fast-food outlets on the island have famously adapted their menus for the period. The religious programme around the parade and scramble includes Taoist ceremonies, Cantonese opera and other theatrical performances, lion and unicorn dances, and drum and gong music, staged around the Pak Tai Temple.

The scale of the modern festival transforms the island for several days. The festival draws tens of thousands of visitors to Cheung Chau each year; the clean record for the festival notes about 40,000 visitors with 44,200 ferry trips in 2025. Ferries are the island's link to the rest of Hong Kong, so the visitor surge is a logistical event in its own right, concentrated on the main day when the afternoon parade and the midnight scramble bookend a single public holiday.

Heritage Recognition and International Fame

The Cheung Chau Jiao Festival was inscribed on China's third national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2011 and on Hong Kong's first Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017. Hong Kong's intangible cultural heritage inventory comprises 507 items, of which twelve are included as national-level items, and the Cheung Chau festival is among the most prominent of them. Hongkong Post issued a set of four stamps, two stamp sheetlets and associated philatelic products on the theme Intangible Cultural Heritage — Cheung Chau Jiao Festival in May 2024, expressly to promote the heritage and help the traditional festival and its folk crafts pass down through generations.

Internationally, the festival's fame rests on its visual distinctiveness. TIME named it among its Top 10 quirky festivals, a description repeated across international coverage, and Fodor's and other travel publishers present it as a headline Hong Kong experience. A visit by Governor Robert Black in 1961 is remembered in heritage accounts as the moment the small island's festival became a focus of attention throughout Hong Kong; inscription on the national list in 2011 and on Hong Kong's Representative List in 2017 then affirmed its cultural value in formal terms. Through the Bun Carnival structure, the heritage rite now also functions as a public participation event, with climbing carnivals, stall games and workshops introducing children and visitors to the tradition between the religious ceremonies.

Continuity, Interruption and Return

The festival's modern history includes interruption as well as revival. The bun scramble itself was absent for 27 years after 1978 before its 2005 return, and the wider festival was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic: travel coverage of the 2023 edition noted that the festival had returned that spring after a three-year break due to the pandemic. The 2025 edition ran in its full modern form, with the Climbing Carnival on 27 April, the main day on 5 May, the Piu Sik Parade in the afternoon and the Bun Scrambling Final from 11.30 p.m. on 5 May to 12.45 a.m. on 6 May, and published arrangements for 2026 followed the same pattern, with the final scheduled for the night of 24 May 2026.

What endures through these changes is the structure recorded in every account: a Taoist thanksgiving for peace centred on Pak Tai, a procession meant to sweep evil from the island's lanes, an island-wide vegetarian observance, and towers of peace buns outside a temple built in 1783. The Cheung Chau Bun Festival remains, as its heritage inscriptions recognise, a living rite maintained by the island's own neighbourhood associations and festival committee, presented to the wider public through the Bun Carnival jointly organised with the Leisure and Cultural Services Department, whose official Bun Carnival site at lcsd.gov.hk carries the festival's public programme and competition arrangements.