Cheung Chau Scrambles the Tower, and Refiles the Buns.

Once a year, on the small Hong Kong island of Cheung Chau, a tower of buns is built expressly so that people may climb it at speed, an arrangement the desk regards as a case study in learning to govern a throw after the fact.

The occasion is the island's Da Jiu festival, a Taoist rite of thanksgiving and appeasement offered to Pak Tai, the deity credited with lifting a plague from Cheung Chau some centuries ago.

The preparations are ascetic. For three days the whole island keeps to a vegetarian diet, a restraint observed so scrupulously that even the fast-food counters quietly take meat off the menu.

Against that austerity rise the bun towers: bamboo-and-steel structures some sixty feet tall, shingled entirely in pink-stamped lotus-paste buns that carry the character for peace, ping on, safety, the very thing the climb once lacked.

The scramble is the throw in question. Competitors race up the tower to seize buns, the higher ones understood to carry the greater fortune, and once they held the loose, hazardous glory of an unregulated ascent.

In 1978 a tower gave way beneath the climbers, and the desk's file gained a hard lesson.

The collapse injured about a hundred people and closed the scramble for twenty-seven years. When it returned in 2005 it did so wearing every control the interval had taught: a steel frame, safety harnesses, mandatory training, a capped field of vetted climbers, and buns of plastic for the towers built to be climbed.

The desk holds this up as its preferred kind of story. The tradition was not abandoned after the loss event; it was re-engineered until the joy could be released safely, which is the whole of our discipline in miniature.

Around the scramble the older observances continue, the floating-colours parade of children borne aloft on hidden supports, the offerings to Pak Tai, the buns later shared out among the crowd for luck.

Compliance verdict: a throw that suffered its failure, studied it, and came back certified, harness clipped, roster capped, fortune intact. The desk files Cheung Chau as proof that a tradition can survive its own risk assessment. Cleared without reservation.