Legend of seven celestial maidens

It is that time of the year when, in the midst of observing the month-long Hungry Ghost Festival, my family looks forward to celebrating the legend of the Seven Fairy Maidens (七姊仙女), sometimes also known as the Seven Fairy Sisters. There are some stories based around the seven celestial sisters but the most famous is the romance between the youngest sister, the Seventh Maiden, and a mortal man named Tong Eng (董永).

And before going any further, I want to say that this story is sometimes confused with the much better-known legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl which is celebrated during the Mid-Autumn Festival that comes about a month later. Both involve a mortal man, a celestial woman and an unhappy separation. But they are two different stories.

Here, I want to tell the story of Tong Eng who was a poor young man whose greatest virtue was his devotion to his father. He was so poor that he could not afford his father a proper burial. So, in order to raise the money, Tong Eng sold himself into servitude. It was apparently this extraordinary act of filial devotion that caught the attention of the Seventh Maiden. Moved by what she had seen, she descended from Heaven to the mortal world and married him.

But being married to a celestial being did not immediately solve Tong Eng's problems. He was still bound by his agreement to serve his new master. And so, the Seventh Maiden decided to do something about it. She approached the master and offered to weave ten bolts of silk overnight. When she presented the silk to the master the next morning, he was so impressed that he reduced Tong Eng's period of servitude from years to just 100 days.

For a while, it seemed that the couple might actually have found their happy ending except that Heaven had other ideas. Once the heavenly authorities discovered that one of their fairies had married a mortal, this breach was reported to the Jade Emperor who ordered the Seventh Maiden to return to Heaven.

She had little choice but to leave her husband. A heart-breaking tale, and one that turns an ordinary love story into a Chinese legend: love is found, happiness is briefly enjoyed, and then the heavens themselves decide that the relationship cannot continue.

There are later versions of this legend which are somewhat kinder to the couple. In these, the Seventh Maiden is eventually stripped of her immortality, allowing her to return to Tong Eng and remain with him permanently.

But to me, the legend of the Seven Sisters is most relevant in the traditions surrounding the Chhit-Chiah (七姊仙女) Festival, which falls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. In my family, the worship of the Seven Maidens is carried out after 11pm on the evening of the sixth day, which is tonight, when the calendar is considered to have crossed over into the seventh day. I remember how, days or even weeks before this day, my grandmother and mother would have started preparing for the occasion. They would purchase perfume or the hun pniah, or even make their own bedak sejuk, all of which were offered to the Seven Maidens. These are small details from my childhood that have stayed with me, even though I probably paid little attention at the time to the significance of what they were doing.

By the way, the Seven Maidens don't appear only in the Tong Eng story. They make a brief appearance in the classic Chinese novel Journey to the East, where they were celestial peach-pickers. Their job was to tend to the peaches in Heaven, which was a rather important responsibility given the magical properties of those fruits. Unfortunately, they happened to awaken the Monkey King. And Sun Wukong was not particularly pleased when he discovered that he had not been invited to a heavenly banquet. The predictable result was that he cast a spell that left the seven sisters frozen.

There are also regional variations of the Seven Maidens story. In Hainan, for instance, local tradition tells of the seven sisters coming to the aid of the indigenous Li people when they were threatened by a demon. After defeating it and protecting the people, the sisters eventually became seven mountain peaks. These variations are particularly interesting in that they show how a familiar group of mythological figures can acquire completely different identities as their stories travel from one part of China to another. That is one reason old legends survive. They are passed from one generation to another, picked up by different communities and reshaped according to local beliefs, customs and circumstances.

The Seven Maidens may be celestial beings but their stories are really about rather earthly matters like filial devotion, love, sacrifice, skill and the choices that have to be made between love and duty. And perhaps that is why the story of Tong Eng and the Seventh Maiden has survived for so long. Fairies may live in Heaven, but the problems they face are still very much down-to-earth.