The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, the Qixi legend

The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl (牛郎织女) is one of China's "Four Great Folk Legends" (中国四大民间传说), together with Meng Jiangnü weeping at the Great Wall, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, and the Legend of the White Snake: four love stories among the most widely told in China.

The tale exists in many versions. This is an outline widely told today:

• a cowherd (牛郎) lives with an old ox;

• helped by the ox, he takes the robe of a heavenly weaver (织女) while she is bathing, and they marry;

• they have two children, but the Queen Mother (王母娘娘) has the Weaver brought back to heaven;

• the old ox dies and leaves the Cowherd its hide, which lets him go up to heaven with the children;

• the Queen Mother pulls a pin from her hair and draws a river between them: the Milky Way;

• moved by their love, magpies form a bridge (鹊桥) so that they can meet, once a year, on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month.

Encyclopaedia Britannica gives another version: the Weaver is the daughter of the Jade Emperor, for whom she spins seamless brocade robes out of clouds. Allowed to visit the earth, she marries the Cowherd and neglects her weaving. Her angry father places the lovers on opposite sides of the Milky Way.

Before they were lovers, the Cowherd and the Weaver were names of stars. The oldest known mention is in the Classic of Poetry (诗经, Shījīng), the anthology of Zhou (周) dynasty poems: Wikipedia dates it to more than 2,600 years ago, and Chinese sources call it the earliest sketch of the legend.

The poem is "Da Dong" (大东), in the Xiaoya (小雅) section. In its fifth and sixth stanzas the poet looks up at the Milky Way, simply called "Han" (汉). There he sees the Weaver (织女), who "shuttles" seven times a day without ever weaving a patterned cloth, and the Cowherd (牵牛, his name in the poem), who shines but pulls no cart.

The poem says nothing of love between them: they are only stars. According to Chinese Wikipedia, they had become a couple by the Warring States period at the latest: Qin almanacs written on bamboo slips (日书) already mention an ill-fated marriage between the Cowherd and the Weaver. Under the Han (汉朝) they were depicted as two deities, one male and one female.

In 120 BCE Emperor Wu of Han (汉武帝) had Kunming Lake (昆明池) dug and set up two stone statues, the Cowherd and the Weaver, on its east and west banks, facing each other as if across the Heavenly River.

The Nineteen Old Poems (古诗十九首), anonymous Han poems later collected by Prince Xiao Tong (萧统) in the Wenxuan (文选) anthology, already tell a love story. In the tenth, "Far Away, the Cowherd Star" (迢迢牵牛星), the Weaver works her shuttle but cannot finish her cloth and weeps; a single stretch of water, clear and shallow, keeps her from her beloved, and they gaze at each other without a word.

The magpie bridge appears in the Fengsu tongyi (风俗通义) of Ying Shao (应劭), an Eastern Han scholar: on the seventh night of the seventh month, the Weaver crosses the river on a bridge of magpies, which is said to be why magpies have bald heads on that day. Most of that book is lost, and the passage is known only from quotations in later works.

A passage attributed to the Xiaoshuo (小说) of Yin Yun (殷芸, 471-529), a scholar of the Liang (梁) dynasty, tells a story close to Britannica's version: east of the Heavenly River, the Weaver, daughter of the Heavenly Emperor (天帝), weaves cloud brocade year after year; her father, seeing her alone, marries her to the Cowherd on the west bank; once married, she stops weaving; angry, he sends her back east and allows them one meeting a year. Yin Yun's book is lost: the passage is known from a quotation in Feng Yingjing's (冯应京) Yueling guangyi (月令广义).

The Weaver's family changes from one version to another: daughter of the Heavenly Emperor, his granddaughter, daughter of the Queen Mother, or the Queen Mother's granddaughter.

Under the Northern Song, the poet Qin Guan (秦观) wrote a song lyric (ci) on the myth to the tune "Que qiao xian" (鹊桥仙, "Immortal at the Magpie Bridge"). Its last two lines say that if love lasts, it does not matter that the lovers are not together every day.

Today the "Legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl" (牛郎织女传说) has been on the second national list of intangible cultural heritage since 2008, in the folk literature category, submitted by Heshun (和顺, Shanxi) and Yiyuan (沂源, Shandong) counties.

In the sky, the Weaver is the star Vega and the Cowherd is Altair. Two other stars of Aquila, β and γ Aquilae, stand for their two children. In Chinese, Vega is called 织女一, "first star of the Weaver". Altair lies about 16.7 light years from us, Vega about 25. With Deneb they form the Summer Triangle, and some see Deneb as the bridge between them.

The Double Seventh festival, Qixi (七夕), falls on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month, the date of the yearly meeting. It is also called the Qiqiao (乞巧, "begging for skill") festival: girls prayed to be given the Weaver's skill at needlework. One test was to lay a needle gently on the surface of a bowl of water, where it floated: the ripples or the shadow it made were read to tell whether the girl would be a skilled embroiderer.

Qixi is often described today as the "Chinese Valentine's Day". On 20 May 2006 the State Council put it on the first national list of intangible cultural heritage, which had 518 items.