Cultural travellers in China will know that the seventh day of the seventh month according to the Chinese lunar calendar is Qīxī Festival which literally means the festival of the Evening of Sevens but is increasingly translated as ‘Chinese Valentine’s Day’. This year that means 10th August. So good news for romantics – in China you get two opportunities to write that special poem that will win you undying love. And good news for florists who get to sell twice as many red, red roses.
Underneath the commercial opportunities are there any meaningful links between the two events and the ideas of love they represent?
‘ The rose is red, the violet’s blue,
The honey’s sweet, and so are you.
Thou art my love and I am thine;
I drew thee to my Valentine.’
Valentine’s card from 1784
Qīxījié can be dated to at least the Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD220) and is based on the story of a cowherd Niúláng and Zhīnǚ, a weaver-girl and daughter of a goddess. Although there is romance in the courtship of a mortal boy and the divine girl, in fact this story is a celebration of married love. The critical part of the story is that the two are separated after they have been married and raised a family of two children. The cowherd’s cow sacrifices his life to provide a magical coat made from his hide that will allow Niúláng to fly up into heaven to rescue Zhīnǚ.
Once every year, on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar,Niúláng is reunited with Zhīnǚ and his children. A flock of magpies form a bridge between the stars of Vega and Altair that allows Niúláng to cross over the river and be with his loved ones. This bridge can be seen in the night sky.
The image of Niúláng waiting on one side of the Milky Way with his two children to be re-united once a year with Zhīnǚ is very different from Western representations of a naughty Cupid shooting arrows of romantic desire at single and unattached young men or women.
There are important differences too between the sorts of customs or traditions associated with the two festivals. The folk traditions of Qīxījié focus on the girl as the active partner. One aspect of the legend of Zhīnǚ is her skilled needlework and one theme in traditional celebrations across China are opportunities for young women to show their prowess with a needle. For example, in some places girls gather in the evenings to show how quickly they can join needle and thread in the twilight. How should we interpret something like this? On the one hand it’s clearly ‘domestication’ – preparing wives for a lifetime of sewing clothes for family and husband. On the other hand, however compromised, it is a focus on the skills of creativity and dexterity in otherwise patriarchal societies.
How does this compare to Western ideas of Valentine ? Valentine’s Day was an invention of the Middle Ages and as such grew out of the ideas of courtly love. In this culture the focus is on the boy, rather than the girl. It is the boy who must perfect himself to gain love. It is linked to the image of the knight, who must show all the skills of chivalry, including writing romantic poetry, to be worthy of his lover. Are these values any more feminist than their Chinese equivalent? Well the focus on men having do something is positive, but unfortunately courtly love idealises women as objects of desire, just as much as some QiXi traditions idealise women as objects of domestic service.
So it seems our Western and Chinese Valentines have nothing in common. But let’s look again at the core myths of the two days. Our western St Valentine loses his life for his love of his religion, which in later stories was linked to his unfulfilled love for his jailer’s daughter. In this legend, the first ‘valentine’ becomes his farewell letter to this girl before he is executed.
In the story of Zhīnǚ and Niúláng an Ox gives up his life to help Niúláng into heaven to rescue Zhīnǚ. So we have our link. At the level of psychology or archetype, love involves sacrifice. I’m sure anyone who has ever truly loved will agree with this. We are all such little bundles of selfishness, bumping around in a busy, crowded world, trying to get our own way as often as we can. But we cannot love like this. Man or woman, Asian or Western we must lose something of ourselves in love, to find ourselves renewed in the entwining of shared lives.
So this Qīxījié lose yourself and find true love. And don’t forget the roses!
