The Qixi Festival: two stars, a bridge of magpies, and a needle in the dark

Always the seventh of the seventh on the Chinese calendar; on the western one it drifts across August and occasionally into the last days of July, because the lunar months fall short of the solar year and a whole extra month is inserted every two or three years to catch up. These dates are computed from the same engine that runs our calendar converter, past years included.

Go outside on a clear August night and look up: the Milky Way runs across the sky, and on either side of it, bright and unmistakable, are Vega and Altair. Chinese astronomers named them the Weaver Girl and the Oxherd, and the whole festival is an attempt to explain why two such obvious stars are kept on opposite banks of a river.

The first explanation, though, is not a love story. It is a grievance. The earliest text to name them is a poem in the Book of Songs, "Da Dong," in which a man from the overtaxed eastern states looks up at the heavens and finds them as useless as the court. There is the River of Heaven, he says, and it shines. There is the Weaver Girl, who shifts her place seven times a day and never finishes a bolt of cloth. There is the bright Oxherd, who does not pull a cart. Two well-paid celestial officials, sitting in plain view, producing nothing. There is no romance in it, and the Weaver Girl of the oldest poem is skiving.

The pining arrives in the Han dynasty. One of the Nineteen Old Poems puts the two stars in a single frame: far, far the Oxherd star; bright, bright the girl by the river; her white hands at the loom, the shuttle clacking, no cloth finished all day, and her tears falling like rain. The river between them is clear and shallow, the poem says, and how wide can it be? A brimming strip of water, and they cannot say a word to each other. That poem is the festival's real founding text. It gives the stars a feeling, and it gives the Weaver Girl the thing that would define her for two thousand years, which is not her heart but her hands.

The rest of the furniture arrives in stages. A scholar of the Eastern Han, Ying Shao, is quoted as saying that on the seventh night the Weaver Girl must cross the river, and magpies are made into a bridge for her. By the sixth century a calendar of southern customs states flatly that the seventh of the seventh is the night the Oxherd and the Weaver Girl meet. The tale everyone knows now, in which the Weaver Girl is a daughter of heaven who marries a cowherd on earth, bears him two children, is dragged home by the Queen Mother of the West, and is cut off from her family by a river the goddess scratches across the sky with her hairpin, is a folk tale that grew around the two stars over the following thousand years, and it has been the story since long before anyone thought to sell it.

Here is the part the greeting cards leave out. The earliest record of anyone actually doing anything on the seventh of the seventh is a single line in the Xijing Zaji, a book that claims to record the Han court: the palace women always threaded seven-holed needles at the Kaijin Tower on the seventh day of the seventh month, and everyone took it up. That is it. No lovers, no magpies. A needle with seven eyes, a tower, a competition.

The logic is straightforward once you know who the Weaver Girl is. She is the sky's seamstress, and on the one night she is close enough to ask, you ask her for her gift. The festival's traditional name is exactly that: qǐ qiǎo, begging for skill. By the sixth century the ritual has a shape. Zong Lin's calendar of the Jing-Chu region says that on this night the women of a household tie colored threads, thread seven-holed needles, some of them needles of gold, silver or brass, and set out wine, dried meat and melons on a table in the courtyard to beg for skill. Then the exam: if a spider spins a web across the melon, that counts as the Weaver Girl's answer. Skill granted.

Six hundred years later, in the capital of the Northern Song, the whole thing has become an industry. Meng Yuanlao, writing down the Kaifeng of his youth, lists the streets where clay dolls called mohele were sold for the festival, set on carved and painted stands, some dressed in red gauze, some hung with gold and pearls and kingfisher feather. Wealthy families built a "skill-begging tower" of colored silk in the courtyard and laid out the dolls, carved melons, wine, a writing set and needle and thread; the boys composed poems and the girls "presented their skill," burning incense and bowing in rows. The women threaded needles facing the moon. And the spider test had been domesticated: you put a small spider in a box overnight, and in the morning, if the web was round and even, you had skill.

The last and best version comes from a description of Beijing published in 1635. At noon on the seventh, women set out a basin of water in the sun and let it stand until a film formed on the surface. Then each girl dropped an embroidery needle on the water, and it floated, and the test was the shadow it cast on the bottom of the bowl. A shadow like a cloud, a flower, a bird or a beast, or like a shoe or a pair of scissors, meant she had begged skill and got it. A shadow "coarse as a mallet, fine as a thread, or straight as a candle," the book says, was the sign of clumsiness, "and the women sigh, and some of the girls weep." For most of its history, that is what Qixi was: an annual examination in dexterity, with results, taken by the people whose marriage prospects depended on the answer. It was a night about hands, and it could break your heart, but not in the way the retailers mean.

The romance was always there in the poems, and it is the poems that made the modern festival possible. In the eighth century Bai Juyi ended his long ballad of the Tang emperor and his doomed consort with a vow whispered in the Hall of Long Life on the seventh of the seventh, at midnight, with no one near: in the sky, to be two birds flying wing to wing; on earth, two trees with branches grown together. In the eleventh Qin Guan wrote the lyric that every Chinese speaker can finish, "Immortals at the Magpie Bridge," and its last line is the closest thing the festival has to a motto: if two hearts are true for the long run, what does it matter that they are not together morning and night. It is a poem about the two stars. It is also, plainly, a consolation for anyone in a long-distance relationship, and it has been read that way for nine hundred years.

So the raw material was old. The packaging was not. By the 1990s the western Valentine's Day had arrived in Chinese cities with the rest of the imported holidays, and the question "why don't we have one of our own" was in the air. In 1993 an official at the Propaganda Department floated the idea of designating Qixi as China's Valentine's Day, and nothing came of it. The first public event to put the two words together seems to have been a "Seventh Month Seventh Love Festival" staged by the Hebei writers' and artists' federation in 2002. Retailers did not need to be told twice. Within a decade the seventh night was a fixture of the jewelry, restaurant and flower-delivery calendar, and in 2006 the state added the festival to its first national list of intangible cultural heritage, item X-4, which protects the customs of a night that most people now keep by booking a table.

Folklorists have grumbled about this from the start, and their strongest point is a calendar one. If any traditional festival was a lovers' night, it was the Lantern Festival in the first month, the one evening a year when the curfew lifted and unmarried women were out in the crowded streets after dark, which is where the Song lyrics put their chance encounters. Qixi's own customs were a needle and a bowl of water. None of this will change what happens on the seventh of the seventh, and there is nothing wrong with a country deciding it wants a Valentine's Day of its own. The character for love, if you want to write it in a card, has its own page, and so does the god the red thread actually belongs to, Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon, who is not in the Qixi story either. But it is worth knowing that the women who kept this festival for two thousand years would have found the idea of spending it on a man distinctly odd. They were busy.