Text: There was once a poor cowherd, Niulang (牛郎), who lived alone with an old ox. One day the ox spoke, telling him that seven heavenly maidens were coming down to bathe in the river, and that if he hid the youngest one’s robes, the Weaver Girl Zhinü (织女) would not be able to return to the sky and would become his wife. He did, and she did. They had two children and lived happily.

The Queen Mother of the West discovered that her granddaughter had married a mortal. She came down and pulled Zhinü back into the heavens. Niulang followed, with his two children carried in baskets on a shoulder pole. The old ox had told him before dying to wear its hide so he could fly. He came close. But the Queen Mother pulled out her hairpin and drew a line across the sky, and the line became a river of stars: the Milky Way. 

Niulang and Zhinü are now two stars on opposite banks of the river, unable to cross. Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies in the world fly up to form a bridge across the heavenly river, and the two of them meet for one night. This has become China’s equivalent to Valentine’s Day. 

Context: Told to me by my mother, IW. She has told it to me in some form since I was small, sometimes as a bedtime story. The story even became a tool to teach me Chinese as I vividly remember reading it from a book of fairytales. For most of her life and for most of mine, the Milky Way that the story turns on has been invisible: we have always lived in areas too light-polluted for it. On a family vacation to Fiji several years ago, on a beach far from any artificial light, we saw the Milky Way clearly for the first time. It did look like a river. 

Analysis: ‘The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd’ is one of the four great Chinese folk tales, with attestations reaching back to the Han dynasty. It explains a visible celestial phenomenon (the Milky Way as a river, with Niulang as Altair and Zhinü as Vega on either side), supplies the etiology for the Qixi festival on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and exists in clear regional variation across Han Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese traditions. IW’s telling is a standard northern Chinese version. What stays with me about hearing it for years and only later seeing the Milky Way clearly, on a Fijian beach, is that the myth was composed by people who could see the river every clear night. To stand under a sky where the river is visible was to recover the perceptual ground that produced the story. It was a powerful moment for us both.