Twenty-seven years after the British colonial authorities banned it as too dangerous, one of East Asia's most unusual religious and athletic spectacles is about to be revived.
After years of debate, local civil servants have granted permission for the resumption on Sunday night of the spring festival practice on Cheung Chau Island of climbing a tower to grab sweet buns at midnight. But they have laid down so many rules -- only 12 climbers will be allowed, for example, and they must wear safety harnesses roped to the tower -- that many on the outlying island grumble that the event will never be the same.
"It was much more exciting in the past, so many people rushed to the towers," said Woo Liu, a 73-year-old resident. "We could do it without any ropes at all."
For decades, villagers erected three 14m bamboo towers each spring on a concrete platform in front of a temple to the local sea gods. Thousands of buns were tied to each tower with thread as part of a complex ceremony believed to have started as a way to commemorate the islanders who died in a 19th-century outbreak of bubonic plague.
At midnight, after Taoist priests had blessed the buns, the men of the village -- no women were allowed -- would clamber up the towers in a race to the topmost buns, believed to be the luckiest and most blessed of all. The buns have fillings of lotus seed paste, sesame paste or red bean paste.
Villagers saved some of the buns from the towers each year, drying them in the sun, Woo recalled, to boil when a child fell ill. A child who drank the bun water after it cooled was expected to recover.
Disaster came in 1978 when one of the three towers tipped over under the weight of close to 100 climbers, hitting another tower, which also fell. Bamboo poles and climbers plummeted into the tightly packed crowd below.
Some 100 people were injured, many seriously. The injured overwhelmed the island's small hospital and many had to be taken to hospitals on Hong Kong Island, nearly an hour away by ferry, said Yung Chi-ming, 62, who was at the festival that night as an organizer, but did not climb.
Soon after the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997, Yung and others began seeking permission to revive the ritual, partly because it was a tradition and partly as a way to attract tourists to an ancient community with no cars (the alleyways are too narrow) but few good beaches.
With the revival have come the many new regulations.
In the race to the top of the tower, islanders used to grab rivals by an arm or leg and shove them down. That has been prohibited this year.
Three bamboo towers covered with buns are being erected for religious purposes, but there is only one 14m tower for climbing, and it is made of steel. Designed to Hong Kong skyscraper standards, the steel is anchored to a very large, heavy metal plate buried beneath 41cm of concrete. Something like a cellphone tower in the US, it has been wrapped in bundles of bamboo to disguise the girders and make it resemble a traditional tower.
Blue plastic impact-absorbing boxes have been spread around the base of the tower and covered with thick blue gym mats, in case any climber's equipment malfunctions.
The race to the top of the tower now has rules worthy of a Survivor or Fear Factor television episode. Several hundred buns at the tower's pinnacle will be worth nine points apiece, buns just below will be three points and the rest of the 8,000 buns on the tower will be worth one point apiece.
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