Yue Lao (月老): The Old Man Under the Moon and the Red Thread of Fate

You already know the red thread. You have seen it on a wrist, in a tattoo, in a hundred anime episodes: an invisible red string that ties you to the one person you are meant to find. What you may not know is that it belongs to a specific god, that the god belongs to a specific story, and that the story is far stranger than the bracelet. The god is Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon, China's god of marriage, and the tale that created him, written in the ninth century, involves a bag of red cord, an underworld ledger, a three-year-old beggar's child, a hired knife, and a bride who never takes off the little flower patch between her eyebrows. He is still in business. In Taipei, a temple that installed him in 1971 now counts its successes in boxes of wedding cookies, thousands a year. Here is where the thread comes from.

The thread you have already seen

The red string has traveled further than the god. Japan took the image early, and the akai ito, the red thread of fate tied around the little fingers of two people destined to meet, is by now a stock device of manga, anime and romance drama, which is how most of the world met it: on a pinkie, in a cartoon, with no old man in sight. From there it went onto wrists as a bracelet and onto skin as a fine red line of ink. The Chinese original ties ankles, not fingers, and it comes with a bureaucrat attached.

The bureaucrat has had a recent star turn of his own. Till We Meet Again, a 2021 Taiwanese fantasy written and directed by Giddens Ko from his own novel, is titled in Chinese simply Yue Lao: a young man dies, loses his memory, and is offered a choice by the underworld between rebirth as a snail and a traineeship in the matchmaking department, tying red threads between the living. It collected a string of Golden Horse nominations, took a quarter of a billion Taiwan dollars at the local box office, and sent the god's name spiking in search engines a long way from any temple.

How people actually pray to him

The temples are the living part, and Taipei's Xiahai City God Temple, in the old merchant quarter of Dadaocheng, is the famous one. The temple is dedicated to the city god; Yue Lao joined its pantheon only in 1971, according to Taiwan Panorama, which interviewed the staff. The ritual they describe is simple and has the great merit of being countable. You light incense and introduce yourself to the god, name, age, address, and what you are looking for. You receive a red thread. You pass it three times in a circle over the smoke of the incense burner and then carry it in your wallet. The offerings have their own logic: lead coins, because the word for lead in Taiwanese sounds like the word for a fated match, and granulated sugar, to sweeten the god's disposition and, one assumes, your own. When a match ends in marriage, the couple comes back with a box of wedding cookies, and the temple keeps count.

The count is the interesting part. The temple's marketing director, Titan Wu, told the magazine that 310 couples returned with cookies in 2000, 3,177 in 2003, and 7,871 in 2011, an average of twenty-one boxes a day, and that over twelve years the god had been credited with more than fifty thousand marriages. You may believe what you like about the causation. The queue is real. Tainan's temples have their own Yue Lao shrines, Hong Kong and Singapore theirs, and most of Taiwan's, the magazine noted, were installed in the twenty or thirty years before 2009, which tells you this is a cult that has grown, not survived.

Can the thread be read in advance?

People have always wanted to. The old man in the story will not show anyone the ledger, but China built a whole tradition of trying to read it sideways, by comparing the birth years of two people to see whether their animals get along, and that tradition is very much alive: if you want to know what the matchmakers of the old villages would have said about you and someone in particular, the Chinese zodiac compatibility pages walk through every pair of signs. The other place the thread gets a night of its own is the seventh of the seventh lunar month, Qixi, sold now as Chinese Valentine's Day, though the god of the red thread is not in that story either. He has his own.

The inn at Songcheng

The story is called "The Inn of Betrothal," Dinghun Dian, by Li Fuyan, a writer of the early ninth century, and it survives because the great Song anthology Taiping Guangji of 978 copied it into its section on predestined marriages. It begins with a young man in a hurry. Wei Gu of Duling, orphaned early, wants a wife and cannot get one; every proposal falls through. In the second year of the Zhenguan era, which is 628, traveling to Qinghe, he puts up at an inn south of Songcheng, and a fellow guest arranges for him to meet a go-between at dawn outside the Longxing Temple to discuss the daughter of a former official. Wei Gu, keen, goes early.

"The slanting moon was still bright," the story says, "and an old man was sitting on the steps, leaning on a cloth bag, checking a book by its light." Wei Gu looks over his shoulder and cannot read a word of it, which annoys him, since he has studied since childhood and can even read the Sanskrit of the western countries. What book is this? "Not a book of this world," says the old man, amused. What, then? "A book of the underworld." And what is an officer of the underworld doing in the road at dawn? The old man explains, with the patience of a civil servant, that the officers of the dead manage the affairs of the living, so of course they walk among them; on any road half the travelers are ghosts, and you cannot tell which. His own department? "The marriage register of the whole world."

Wei Gu, who has one thing on his mind, asks whether the match he has come to discuss will work. No, says the old man; your wife is three years old at present, and will enter your house at seventeen. And what is in the bag? Red cords, "for tying the feet of husband and wife. Once they are seated I secretly bind them. Though the families be enemies, though rank divide them like a gulf, though one be posted to the ends of the earth and the other live in a far province, once this cord is tied, there is no escaping it. Your foot is already tied to hers. What use is looking elsewhere?" And where is she? "The daughter of the old woman who sells vegetables north of this inn."

The knife between the eyebrows

At daylight the go-between has not come, and the old man rolls up his book, shoulders his bag and walks off. Wei Gu follows him into the vegetable market. There is a one-eyed old woman carrying a filthy three-year-old girl. "That," says the old man, "is your wife." Wei Gu's reply is the reason this story is worth telling and the greeting cards leave out. "May I kill her?" The old man says the child is fated to eat a great salary and to hold a fief through her son, and how could she be killed; and vanishes.

Wei Gu sharpens a small knife and gives it to his servant with the promise of ten thousand cash. The next day the servant walks into the crowded market with the blade in his sleeve, stabs, and runs. Asked whether he hit, he says: "I aimed at her heart, but by ill luck only struck between the eyebrows." Wei Gu goes on proposing, and goes on failing, for fourteen years. Then, on his father's merit, he is given a post at Xiangzhou, where the prefect, Wang Tai, likes his work and marries him to his daughter, a girl of sixteen or seventeen, and beautiful. Wei Gu is entirely happy. There is only one oddity. "Between her eyebrows she always wore a small flower patch, and never took it off, even to bathe or when alone."

After a year he presses her, and she weeps and tells him. She is not the prefect's daughter but his niece; her father had been magistrate of Songcheng and died in office, her mother and brother died after, and she was left as an infant with her nurse, a woman called Chen, on a farm south of the town, near an inn, selling vegetables to get by. At three, carried through the market, she was stabbed by a madman. The scar is still there, under the patch. "Was the nurse one-eyed?" asks Wei Gu. "Yes. How did you know?" "The one who stabbed you was me." They tell each other everything, and honor each other, the story says, more than ever; a son becomes a provincial governor. The magistrate of Songcheng, hearing the tale, renamed the inn: the Inn of Betrothal.

He is never called the Old Man Under the Moon in his own story

Now the correction, which is small and tells you how gods are made. Read the tale again and you will notice that the old man has no name. He is not Yue Lao. He is not the Old Man Under the Moon. He is an old man who happens to be reading under the moon, because it is before dawn and that is the light there is. The title is the story's setting promoted to a proper noun by a thousand years of retelling, and by the time the novel Dream of the Red Chamber was written, around 1760, the promotion was complete. In chapter 57 Aunt Xue explains the whole system to two girls as settled fact, opening with the old saying that a marriage fated across a thousand miles is drawn together by a single thread, and going on: "The one in charge of marriages is the Old Man Under the Moon, who settles it in advance and secretly hobbles the two people's feet with a single red silk thread, and though the two families be divided by seas and countries, though they be sworn enemies, in the end the two will find their way to becoming husband and wife." The saying she quotes, qiānlǐ yīnyuán yī xiàn qiān, is still the first thing a Chinese speaker says when a couple met by absurd coincidence. When exactly the name attached to the man, between the ninth century and the eighteenth, the story itself cannot tell us, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What is certain is that the temples came after the name, and the wedding cookies after the temples. Set the two side by side and you can see how far the god has traveled from his story:

What kind of god ties feet together?

It is worth being clear what he is, because the English word cupid gets used and it is wrong. Cupid shoots you, and you want. The old man ties you, and you arrive. He is not a god of desire at all; he never asks whether Wei Gu will like the girl, and Wei Gu, on being told, tries to have her killed. He is a clerk of outcomes, a functionary of the underworld with a ledger, the marriage department of the same bureaucracy that keeps the register of deaths, and his cord is a hobble, tied to the feet so that wherever the two people walk they walk toward each other. That is a very Chinese idea of fate: not a spark, but paperwork, filed in advance, and enforced by geography. It is also, if you sit with the story a moment, a consoling one. The hero does everything wrong. He is impatient, snobbish, and homicidal. And the thread holds anyway, and the girl he tried to erase grows up to be the wife he cannot imagine having done without, with a small flower on her forehead to remind him. The god's whole promise is that your mistakes are not strong enough to cut it. Which is, when you think about it, exactly what people are asking for when they pass a red thread through the smoke.