Climbers Race Up Bun Tower: Hong Kong Festival

The steamed buns were stacked fourteen metres high, thousands of them covering a bamboo tower like edible scales. In Hong Kong yesterday, contestants clawed their way toward the summit during the annual Cheung Chau Bun Scrambling Competition, the crescendo of a festival that transforms an island into something between carnival and pilgrimage.

This is how tradition survives in a city that rebuilds itself every decade — not in museums, but in motion. The Bun Festival dates back over a century, born from plague and prayer, evolved into spectacle. Climbers in numbered jerseys scale the tower with the intensity of mountaineers, grabbing buns as proof of their ascent. The higher the bun, the greater the luck it carries.

I watched this festival once during my Singapore years, when weekend flights to Hong Kong cost less than dinner in Marina Bay. What struck me wasn't the climbing — it was the waiting. Families spread blankets on the harbour promenade, children sticky with sugar from bun-shaped sweets, grandmothers explaining why we climb for luck instead of simply buying it.

The winner this year took ninety seconds to reach the top, arms full of steamed promises. But the real victory belongs to Cheung Chau itself — a fishing village that figured out how to honor its ghosts while feeding its economy. During festival week, hotels fill, restaurants run out of everything, and the ferry from Central arrives heavy with tourists carrying cameras and empty stomachs.

Hong Kong's luxury has always been its ability to stack experiences this way — ancient ritual and modern competition occupying the same space, neither compromising the other. The climbers know they're performing tradition as much as preserving it. The spectators know they're witnessing something that exists nowhere else, something that survives because it refuses to choose between sacred and commercial.

By evening, the tower was dismantled, the buns distributed, the island returned to its quieter rhythms. But for one afternoon, gravity was negotiable and luck hung from bamboo scaffolding, waiting to be claimed by anyone brave enough to climb.

The festival continues until the weekend, though the climbing competition happens only once. The buns, thankfully, remain available at ground level.