No Mad Scramble For Cheung Chau Bun Festival

Cheung Chau welcomed visitors on Wednesday for its annual Bun Festival, but for the second year in a row it was a rather subdued affair, with no parade, a much shorter than usual bun tower, and a ban on anyone scaling it.

Huge numbers of people usually throw their hat into the ring for a chance to scramble up the tower to snatch as many buns as they can in three minutes.

But the competition was again called off due to the pandemic. In any case, this year's tower is a mere 4.6 metres high.

Yung Chi-ming, chair of the Cheung Chau Bun Festival Committee, said normally, the tower is 15.5 metres, but it takes more than a hundred people to erect it, and that would be against Covid rules.

Yung said visitor numbers were down by between 60 and 70 percent compared to the pre-pandemic years.

"There used to be tens of thousands of visitors coming for the parade and the bun tower climbing competition. Fewer people have come these past two years. It's a bit better than last year, because we managed to get permission to stage Cantonese operas again," he said.

Customers were queuing up at the Kwok Kam Kee cake shop to buy buns. Martin Kwok from the store said people were heading to Cheung Chau for some relief from the stress of the pandemic, but business has still been slower than normal.

"We used to make sixty thousand buns before, but under the pandemic this year and the last, we are making around forty to fifty thousand... I can't be too worried about next year, let's just hope the pandemic will end soon," said Kwok.

A customer who grew up and studied on Cheung Chau agreed that the island was lacking some of its usual vibrancy.

"Cheung Chau was lively and full of people before the pandemic... The atmosphere is a lot different from previous years," she lamented, adding that she and her friends would leave as soon as they had got their buns.