The Cheung Chau Bun Festival is a kind of Jiao Festival - a festival that a village might hold every year or every few years. More specifically, it's a Tai Ping Qing Jiao [literal meaning: "the Purest Sacrifice celebrated for Great Peace"]. Such festivals were perhaps widespread across south China, but under Mao were regarded as feudal superstition, and were suppressed in mainland China.
It is Thursday morning - in May 1989 - on Cheung Chau, the most populous of Hong Kong's outlying islands. Though it is only 8am, the day is already hot and humid, more like mid-summer than early May: a typhoon is brewing over the South China Sea.
