The Qixi Festival

The Qixi Festival, also known as the Qiqiao Festival, is a Chinese jubilee celebrating the periodic meeting of Zhinü and Niulang in Chinese tradition. The commemoration is celebrated on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month on the Chinese lunisolar timetable. The jubilee was deduced from Chinese tradition.

Traditionally, it's a day when women dress up in Hanfu which is traditional chinese apparel that has a long flowy mask with loose sleeves and a belt at the midriff. They spend the day preparing immolations of tea, wine, flowers and colorful fruits to supplicate to Zhinu for wisdom and to grant their wishes. This jubilee is deduced from Chinese tradition.

People celebrated the romantic legend of two suckers, Zhinu and Niulang, who were the embroiderer girl and the swineherd. Niulang fell in love with Zhinu, which was offending the law of heaven and made the Jade emperor and the Heavenly Queen Mother angry. One day, Niulang’s ox started to speak, informing Niulang that if he killed him and wore his hide, he could fly over to heaven and see Weaver Girl again. The ox's immolation reunited the two, but the Goddess of Heaven would not stand for it.

She furiously created a swash of stars in the sky, separating the suckers for eternity. A flock of babblers, moved by the chastity of the couple’s devotion, joined together to form a ground between the two. Indeed the Goddess of Heaven was touched, and she agreed to allow the Cowherd and their children to remain in heaven, to be reunited with Weaver Girl only formally at a time, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

While numerous variations of this folk tale are told at the moment, this is a generally bare interpretation of the story. The tale traces its roots back to divination — specifically, the stars Altair and Vega, positioned 16 light times piecemeal at opposite ends of the Milky Way. During the Qixi Festival, the elysian bodies appear to convene in the sky. They're believed to be the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, was an age-old love story written in the stars. In the hearts of generations of Chinese people, love has come to represent the power of true love in prostrating great odds. In Chinese culture, a brace of babblers has also come to emblematize fastness and connubial bliss.