In the rest of Hong Kong, the eighth day of the fourth lunar month is celebrated as an official holiday for Buddha’s Birthday, but on Cheung Chau, the day off is spent memorializing a local story that usually revolves around appealing to gods to stop a plague but can alternatively involve dispelling pirates, appeasing ghosts or all of the above.

Cheung Chau is a village of just over 20,000 people with a low-slung downtown pinched between a long sandy beach and a harbor full of fishing boats. The ferry from the center of Hong Kong takes less than an hour, which makes the island popular with weekend day-trippers, creative types and city commuters in search of cheaper rent and a slower pace of life.

Over the years, the bun festival spawned bun towers, and bun towers morphed into televised bun tower races, complete with Hong Kong-wide selection heats and on-belay safety trainings. Parades of gods and relics turned into parades of “floating” children in traditional costumes, and traditional costumes gave way to political satire and celebrity impersonations.

Somewhere along the way, an international fast-food chain decided to stand in vegetarian solidarity with the famous local fish ball stands that shutter for the meat-free days of the festival, while much of the string of seafood restaurants along the harbor continued to take advantage of big crowds hungry for steamed crab and fried shrimp.

Ask why any of this is the way it is, and the answer from locals and visitors comes down to some version of: “I don’t know. It’s tradition.”

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On top of bun keychains, bun T-shirts, bun magnets, bun pillows and anything else that could plausibly draw souvenir sales with bun imagery, edible buns were for sale for a little over a dollar a piece. The buns are made with one of three sweet paste flavors — lotus seed, red bean or sesame — surrounded by about an inch of spongy, white rice-flour dough, which is itself coated by a kind of thin, steam-smoothed skin stamped with the Chinese character for “safety” or “peace,” depending on whom you ask. Martin Kwok, proprietor of the most famous bun producer on the island, said most people bring them home and re-steam them before eating.