Cowherd and the weaving lady

Although this is the seventh Chinese lunar month when the Hungry Ghosts Festival goes into full swing for 29 or 30 days annually, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month holds a completely different significance altogether. It is on this day that the folklore of the Cowherd and the Weaving Lady takes hold. This is an old Chinese love story and is fascinating because of its astrological origins.

Early sky-watchers in China had discovered that the circumpolar stars revolving round the Pole Star would return to the same place in the sky every 27.33 days, which formed a sidereal month. In relation to this discovery, the Chinese devised the 28 Mansions lunar system as early as the middle of the Shang period (商朝) (circa 14th Century BC). These 28 Mansions are equatorial divisions, or segments of the celestial sphere. A name was given for each of these 28 segments: the ninth mansion, with its star that westerners call Vega, was called Ch'ien Niu (牵牛) or Cowherd and the 10th, symbolised by the star Altair, was named Chih Nu (织女) or Weaving Lady.

As Vega and Altair are close to each other in the sky, it was easy to imagine myth-makers, such were the ancient Chinese, creating the boy-meets-girl romance of Heaven. 

Vega (the Weaving Lady) is the brightest star of the summer triangle.
Then there is Altair (the Cowherd) which is the second brightest,
separated by the Milky Way (the Celestial River) with the fainter 
Deneb (the bridge of magpies) in its midst 

One of the early stories goes back to the state of Ch'u (楚) (BC 740-330) telling of the Cowherd marrying the Weaving Lady who was the youngest of seven grand-daughters of T'ien Ti (天帝) or Lord of Heaven. To pay the dowry, the Cowherd secured a loan of 20,000 strings from T'ien Ti. For a long time, however, the Cowherd was unable to repay the loan. As a punishment, they were transformed into stars. The Cowherd was banished to the west of the Celestial River or Milky Way while the Weaving Lady stayed in the east. However, they were permitted to meet once a year on the seventh night of the seventh moon.

On that night, provided the skies were clear, magpies (鵲) would form a bridge over the Celestial River with their bodies and wings so that the lovers could meet. But if there be rain, the Celestial River became so wide that the bridge could not be formed. So the husband and wife could not always meet by reason of bad weather, sometimes for three or four years at a stretch. But because their love remains immortally young and eternally patient, they remain optimistically happy hoping to meet on the next year's seventh night of the seventh month.

In Malaysia, Chinese households used to pay homage to this pair of celestial lovers during the Seven Fairies Festival (七仙女節 ). As times have changed, this practice is no longer popular among the larger community. In my family, however, we still continue with the tradition on the night of the sixth lunar day, usually around 11.30pm as a new day is deemed to have begun at 11pm. Our worship to the seven fairy sisters would include offering a glass bowl of water. In the past, some in the Chinese community would bottle up the water on the next day as it was deemed to have curative powers. In Penang, and I dare say elsewhere too, the Baba Nyonya community would use the water to make bedak sejok. These are not done nowadays. At best, the women in the household would now share out the water to wash their faces in the hope of radiating a beautiful countenance almost as ravishing as the fairies.

In Chinese culture, the magpie is a very popular bird. As a symbol of good luck and good fortune, the bird is a common subject in Chinese paintings as well as traditional Chinese poetry and couplets. The Quah clansmen in the Ow Quah village, Hokkien province, had named their clan house as Swee Cheok Tong (瑞鵲堂). The closest I can get to translating this name is Auspicious Magpie Society.

The story goes that a long time ago in China, there was a senior member of the Quah clansmen who was a righteous government official. When he finally retired to his village, a flock of magpies had flown to accompany him on his long journey home. Thus, he was inspired enough to name the clan house that he founded as the Swee Cheok Tong. When my forebears migrated south to the nanyang in the mid-19th Century, the clan house that they established in Penang was subsequently named the Penang Swee Cheok Tong Seh Quah Kongsi (檳城瑞鵲堂柯公司). Click here to learn more about the Kongsi's origin.