Cheung Chau

This guide to Cheung Chau, Hong Kong's car-free island, opens with an 18th-century plague and the bamboo towers islanders built, plastered in thousands of steamed buns, to appease restless spirits. It follows the young men who once raced up those towers for luck, and the night the crowd's weight became too much for them to hold. Best heard on the ferry over, before the smell of buns reaches you on land.