When is Tanabata?

Valentine's Day in China is on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month.

Valentine's Day in China, also known as George's Day, Qi Jie's Day and George's Day, is a traditional folk festival in China. Star worship, which originated in Chinese Valentine's Day, is Seven Sisters's birthday in the traditional sense. Seven Sisters was worshipped on July 7th, so it was named Tanabata. After historical development, Tanabata has been endowed with the beautiful love legend of "Cowherd and Weaver Girl", making it a festival symbolizing love. It is considered as the most romantic traditional festival in China, and it has the cultural meaning of "Valentine's Day in China" in contemporary times.

The Origin Time of Valentine's Day in China

China Valentine's Day, also known as Begging for Clevership Festival, originated in the Han Dynasty. Ge Hong's Miscellanies of Xijing in the Eastern Jin Dynasty records that "women in the Han Dynasty often wear seven holes in the building on July 7, and everyone has it". Qiaojie is not to commemorate the love between the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, but to commemorate the Weaver Girl, also known as "Seven Sisters" among the people. Beggar's Day is a festival for women, and Weaver Girl is regarded as the goddess of textile. On the night of the seventh day of July, secular women beg her for wisdom and skills, and they will inevitably ask for a happy marriage. In different times, the ways of seeking skills vary from place to place. The most famous one is to seek skills by threading needles, that is, whoever is fast in threading needles will be "accurate" and those who are slow will be called "accurate". Those who lose it will prepare gifts for those who get it. Skilled spider silk is to put a little spider in a box. How clever the net is. The popular needle-throwing experiment in Ming and Qing dynasties refers to putting the sewing needle into a basin and judging whether it is "clever" by the shape of the needle shadow at the bottom of the basin.

The Origin of Valentine's Day in China

Tanabata is also a phenomenon of digital worship. In ancient times, people listed the first day of the first month, the third day of March, the fifth day of May, the seventh day of July and the ninth day of September as auspicious days, plus multiples of the second and third days of February. "Seven" is the number of beads in each column of the abacus, which is romantic and rigorous, giving people a mysterious aesthetic feeling. "Seven" and "wife" are homophonic, so Qixi has largely become a festival related to women.