Double-Seventh Day, the Chinese Valentine's Day, is around the corner and Guangzhou Opera House will stage a Chinese Huangmei opera - the Fairy Tale of the Cowherd and Weaving Girl, a popular love story that has echoed the special day for centuries. The opera, presented by the Anhui Huangmei Opera Theater from Anhui Province of China, will be performed on August 23 & 24.
About the Double-Seventh Day
The Double-Seventh Day (Qixi Festival) falls on the seventh day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar. According to legend, this is the day when Niulang, a cowherd and Zhinv, a weaving fairy reunite on a "marriage bridge" formed by flocks of magpies in the sky every year. The Double-Seventh Day is also called the Ingenuity-begging Festival (Qiqiao Festival), because Zhinv is the goddess of knitting and weaving and people, especially young women, will plead for sophisticated needlecraft skills.
There are various folk customs and celebrations held on the Double-Seventh Day everywhere in China, such as the customs of "seed plant for child", "catch dew" and "sworn sisterhood under the moon".
About the Fairy Tale of Cowherd and Weaving girl
The fairy tale of the Cowherd and the Weaving Girl is a classic love story between a fairy and a human being. They fall in love with each other, get married, but are forced to separate by the Jade Emperor, the Weaving Girl's father. They are, like the two stars of Altar and Vega, blocked by the Milky Way, but they insist on waiting for each other until the end of the world. Finally, the Emperor is moved by their love and grants them an opportunity to meet each other once a year.
The fairy tale also contains Chinese people's understanding of astrology. The Vega, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra and the embodiment of the Weaving Girl, faces the Altair of the constellation Aquila, the embodiment of Cowherd, across the Milky Way.
On the day, Chinese women will look up into the sky, searching for the Weaver Girl Star and the Cowherd Star and hoping to see their annual gathering.