Origin of Tanabata Festival

Tanabata originated from people’s worship of nature. According to historical documents, at least threeorfour thousand years ago, with people’s understanding of astronomy and the emergence of textile technology, the records of Altair Vega had appeared. People worship stars far more than Altair and Vega. They believe that there are seven stars representing directions in the East, West, North and south, collectively known as the twenty-eight constellations, of which the Big Dipper is the brightest, which can be used to identify directions at night. The first star of the Big Dipper is called Kuixing, also known as Kuixing. Later, there was the imperial examination system. The number one scholar in the middle school was called “the great Kui scholars in the world”, and scholars called Tanabata “Kuixing Festival”, also known as “Book drying Festival”, maintaining the trace that the earliest Tanabata originated from the worship of stars.

“Tanabata” also comes from ancient people’s worship of time. “Seven” is homonymous with “period”. Both month and day are “seven”, giving people a sense of time. In ancient China, the sun, the moon and the five planets of water, fire, wood, gold and earth were called “Qiyao”. In folk, the seven numbers are staged in time, and the “seven and seven” is often the end when calculating time. In the old Beijing, when making a Taoist temple for the dead, it was often perfect to do “77”. The current “week” calculated by “Qiyao” is still reserved in Japanese. “Seven” is homonymous with “auspicious”, and “seven” has the meaning of double auspicious, which is an auspicious day. In Taiwan, July is known as the month of “happiness and auspiciousness”. Because the shape of the word “Xi” in cursive script is like the continuous writing of “seventy-seven”, seventy-seven years old is also called “Xi Shou”.

The Tanabata Festival is the birthday of seven sisters in the traditional sense. Because the worship of “Seven Sisters” is held on July 7th, it is named “Tanabata”. The traditional customs of Tanabata are to worship the seventh sister, pray for blessings and wishes, beg for skillful skills, sit and watch the morning glory Vega, pray for marriage, and store water on Tanabata.

Through historical development, Tanabata has been endowed with the beautiful love legend of “Cowherd and Weaver Girl”. The “Cowherd and Weaver Girl” of Tanabata comes from people’s worship of natural phenomena. In ancient times, people corresponded the astronomical star regions with geographical regions. This correspondence is called “star dividing” in astronomy and “field dividing” in geography. It is said that on the seventh day of July every year, the Cowherd and the weaver girl will meet at the magpie bridge in the sky. Because the weaver girl has a pair of skillful hands that can weave clouds, and the folk girls hope to get the aura of the weaver girl, they “beg for dexterity” on the Chinese Valentine’s day, making it a festival symbolizing love, which is considered to be the most romantic traditional festival in China, and has produced the cultural meaning of “Chinese Valentine’s Day” in contemporary times.

Chinese Valentine’s day began in ancient times, popularized in the Western Han Dynasty, and flourished in the Song Dynasty. Qixi Qiqiao, a festival that originated in the Han Dynasty, is recorded in Ge Hong’s Xijing miscellany in the Eastern Jin Dynasty that “colorful women in the Han Dynasty often wear seven hole needles in the open Lapel building on July 7, and everyone is familiar with it”. This is the earliest record of Qiqiao that we have seen in ancient documents. Later in Tang and Song poetry, women begging for dexterity were also mentioned repeatedly. Wang Jianyou of the Tang Dynasty said in a poem, “the stars are shining, and the palace girls are busy begging for dexterity on Tanabata.”. According to the “legacy of Kaiyuan Tianbao”, Emperor Taizong and his concubines had a banquet in the Qing Palace on Tanabata, and the palace maids begged for tricks respectively. This custom has also been enduring among the people and has continued from generation to generation.

The love story of the Cowherd and the weaver girl is integrated into the begging Festival, and folk girls believe it. Therefore, every seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl “magpie bridge meeting”, the girls will come to the flowers and the moon, look up at the starry sky, and look for the Cowherd and the weaver girl on both sides of the Milky way. They hope to see their annual meeting, beg God to make themselves as clever as the weaver girl, and pray that they can have a satisfactory marriage, Over time, the Tanabata Festival was formed.