The Qixi Festival

Look up at night and a bright star stands on each bank of the Milky Way: Vega of Lyra, the Weaver Girl, second brightest in the northern sky; and Altair of Aquila, the Cowherd, gazing across the river. The ancestors did not make them lovers at first — they read the Weaver Girl's position for the season and the farm calendar; by the Western Zhou at the latest there are records of sacrifice to her star.

The tale of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl was already widespread by the early Qin. But in those days the seventh of the seventh was a bad day — a folk taboo on weddings, to be avoided. From the mid-Western Han the tide turned, and the inauspicious hour became auspicious; by the Eastern Han, Ying Shao's Fengsu Tongyi already records that 'on the seventh night the Weaver Girl must cross the river, and magpies are made her bridge' — that is where the magpie bridge was first built.

From Han and Wei times the date settled on the seventh of the seventh, and the customs took shape: women worshipping the Weaver Girl, threading needles to beg for skill, eating qiaoguo. In 2006 the Qixi Festival entered the first batch of the national intangible cultural heritage list as item Ⅹ-4.

Begging for skill is the festival's main text. Ge Hong'sMiscellaneous Records of the Western Capital (Eastern Jin) notes: 'In Han times the palace maidens would thread seven-eyed needles on the seventh of the seventh at Kaijin Tower, and everyone followed the practice' — the earliest written record of the rite. In the moonlight each girl threads a five-coloured silk through the seven-eyed needle (some use five or nine eyes); the first to finish 'wins skill', the slow 'lose skill'.

Every village proved skill its own way. Some 'floated needles': at noon, lay the needle gently on water and read its shadow at the bowl's bottom — cloud, flower or scissors meant skill won. Some kept 'responsive spiders': seal a spider in a box overnight and judge the roundness and fineness of its web by morning. Others 'grew the skill': soak grain in water days ahead, and on the day itself cut the sprouts for soup.

Of the foods, qiaoguo is the most famous — oil, flour, sugar and honey pressed into moulds and baked; the deft could shape them into the Cowherd and Weaver Girl themselves. Melons and fruit carved into strange flowers and birds were called 'fancy melons'. There was also the old practice of sunning books and clothes — the July sun is strong enough that nothing moths afterwards.

Qixi was once led by women — hence its other names, the Daughters' Festival, the Maidens' Festival. On this night girls gathered to match skills and speak their minds while elders corrected their stitches; craft, feeling and the days to come were handed down, one thread at a time.

The Cowherd and Weaver Girl meet but once a year; the rest of the days each keeps separately, holding faith across a river of stars. Qin Guan's line — 'if love between two lasts long, what matter that they meet but seldom?' — is exactly this kind of keeping.

Today's Qixi mostly looks like this: each busy by day, a late dinner wherever is still open, and on the walk home a look at the sky. City lights are too bright for the Milky Way, but everyone knows where the magpie bridge stands that night.