The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd

At a Glance

• Central figures: Zhinü, the Weaver Girl and daughter of the Jade Emperor, and Niulang, a mortal cowherd whose ox was once a banished celestial being.
• Setting: The heavens and the earth of Chinese myth; the story is the origin legend behind the Qixi Festival, celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.
• The turn: The Jade Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West discover Zhinü has abandoned her celestial duties and married a mortal; the Queen Mother drags her back to the heavens and draws the Milky Way between the two lovers.
• The outcome: Niulang and Zhinü are permanently separated by the river of stars, permitted to meet only once a year when magpies form a bridge across it.
• The legacy: The Qixi Festival, held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when couples honor the reunion of Niulang and Zhinü across the Milky Way.

Zhinü wove the clouds. She wove the fabric of the sky itself - the soft grey veils that draped the mountains at dusk, the bright threads that caught the light between stars. The Jade Emperor valued her work, and she performed it faithfully. But from her place in the heavens she looked down at the earth, and what she saw was a young cowherd moving through his days with a quietness and a sincerity that no celestial being around her possessed. His name was Niulang. She descended without permission.

What she did not know was that Niulang’s ox had its own history. The animal had once lived in the heavens before being cast down, and in its long years beside Niulang it had grown fond of the man and wanted better for him. When the ox saw what was coming, it decided to help.

The Ox Speaks

The ox told Niulang to go to the river. A beautiful maiden would be there with her sisters, it said, and she would be his wife. Niulang trusted the ox - he had always trusted the ox - and he went.

Zhinü was bathing with her celestial sisters when Niulang arrived. Their eyes met across the water. The sisters returned to the sky. Zhinü stayed.

The Years of the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd

She put away her loom and her sky-thread. He put away his solitude. They married, and built a life together with the ordinary rhythms of farming and seasons and children - two of them, a boy and a girl. For a time the sky above their house was just sky: blue in the day, dark and scattered with stars at night, nothing more.

The Jade Emperor found out. So did the Queen Mother of the West. The fury of heaven came down fast and without negotiation. Zhinü had abandoned her post, her duty, her place in the order of things. She had woven herself into a mortal life, and this was not permitted. The Queen Mother came for her personally, and Zhinü was taken back to the sky, back to her loom, back to her work among the stars.

Niulang stood below with the children and watched her go.

The Hide of the Ox

The ox was dying. Age or grief - it is hard to say which. Before it died, it told Niulang to take its hide. The hide would carry him.

Niulang slaughtered the ox and wore the hide. He hung the two children in baskets from a carrying pole across his shoulders and rose into the air, climbing toward the heavens. He could see Zhinü. He was nearly close enough to reach her.

The Queen Mother drew her hairpin out of her hair and dragged it across the sky in a single stroke. Where the hairpin passed, the Milky Way opened - a river of stars, wide and cold and absolute. Niulang stopped on one bank. Zhinü stood on the other. The children looked across the water.

They could see each other. They could not reach each other.

The Bridge of Magpies

The magpies were watching. Every magpie in the world had been watching the whole affair, and what they saw moved them - not toward interpretation or moral judgment, but toward action. On the seventh day of the seventh lunar month of the following year, they flew up in their thousands, wing to wing, and made a bridge across the Milky Way.

Niulang crossed it. Zhinü crossed it. They met in the middle, above the river of stars, with their children beside them.

One day. That was the arrangement the heavens permitted. One day each year, and then Niulang returned to earth, the magpies dispersed, and the Milky Way lay open and uncrossable again until the year turned back to the seventh month.

It is said that on that night, if you stand outside and look up, you can see Zhinü’s star - Vega - bright on one side of the river, and Niulang’s star - Altair - on the other. The magpies that remain on earth are said to go bald-headed at this time of year, their feathers worn away by the weight of the bridge they built. And on the seventh night of the seventh month, couples sit together under the open sky and watch the stars - Zhinü still weaving somewhere up there, Niulang waiting on his bank, the children grown old in memory and still riding their baskets across the light.