Cheung Chau has been continuously inhabited for longer than most places in Hong Kong, which is saying something in a region occupied since the Neolithic. Near Tung Wan Beach, 3,000-year-old rock carvings were identified by geologists in 1970 and are now declared monuments of Hong Kong. They consist of two groups of carved lines surrounding small depressions, below what is now the Warwick Hotel, and face the water with a patience that has nothing to do with tourism. By 1898, when Cheung Chau was leased to the United Kingdom for 99 years under the Second Convention of Peking, the island already had a complex social mix: Hoklo fishing families, Hakka settlers, Chiu Chau traders, and others from Southern China. More of the island's 1898 residents lived on junks than on land.

The central settlement at the tombolo is well-developed — shops, restaurants, temples, residences — but its lanes are barely wide enough for two people to pass comfortably. Because normal motor traffic is impossible, Cheung Chau uses specially designed "village vehicles": small motorized trucks that include miniaturized fire engines, ambulances, and police cars. It is the only place in Hong Kong where emergency services operate at a reduced scale dictated by the infrastructure of an older way of living. The island still has working fishing fleets departing from the harbour, and seafood restaurants line the waterfront. But in recent decades tourism has become the dominant activity, and the ferries from Central — a 55-minute journey, or 35 minutes on the high-speed service — arrive every 30 minutes carrying people who come for the beaches, the food, and the annual spectacle of the Bun Festival.

The Cheung Chau Bun Festival is the island's most famous event. It lasts three to four days and includes a parade of floats featuring young children dressed as historical and mythological characters, balanced on hidden supports in poses that appear physically impossible — the effect is of figures floating several metres in the air. Tens of thousands of visitors arrive for the festival, which is rooted in the island's Pak Tai Temple, one of the oldest in Hong Kong. The Pak Tai Temple was built in 1783, demolished, and completely rebuilt in 1989. Before the altar stand statues of two generals, "Thousand Miles Eye" and "Favourable Wind Ear," said to see and hear everything. In front of the temple are four pairs of guardian lions.

Cheung Chau's most celebrated native is Lee Lai-shan, the windsurfer who won Hong Kong's first and only Olympic gold medal at the 1996 Atlanta Games. She trained on these waters. The island's more unsettling chapter involves a residential complex called Bela Vista Villa on Tung Wan beach: in the late 1990s and early 2000s, more than 25 suicide attempts and 20 deaths occurred there, mostly by charcoal burning, enough that local newspapers began calling Cheung Chau "Death Island." In 2005, a district councillor suggested converting the villa into a ghost-themed tourist attraction with a charcoal-burning museum. The proposal was quickly rejected. The island continued, as islands do, carrying its histories without being defined by any single one of them.