The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl

The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl are characters found in Chinese mythology and appear eponymously in a romantic Chinese folk tale. The story tells of the romance between Zhinü (織女; the weaver girl, symbolized by the star Vega) and Niulang (牛郎; the cowherd, symbolized by the star Altair).^[1] Despite their love for each other, their romance was forbidden, and thus they were banished to opposite sides of the heavenly river (symbolizing the Milky Way).^[1][2] Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, a flock of magpies would form a bridge to reunite the lovers for a single day. Though there are many variations of the story,^[1] the earliest-known reference to this famous myth dates back to a poem from the Classic of Poetry from over 2600 years ago:^[3]

詩經·小雅·大東 … 維天有漢， 監亦有光。 跂彼織女， 終日七襄。 雖則七襄， 不成報章。 睆彼牽牛， 不以服箱。 …

Classic of Poetry, Lesser Court Hymns, Poem 203 … In Heavens there is the Milky Way, It looks down and is bright; slanting is the Weaving Lady, during one day she is seven times removed. Although she is seven times removed, she does not achieve any interwoven pattern; brilliant is the Draught Ox, But one does not yoke into any carriage. …[4]

The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl
The reunion of the couple on the bridge of magpies. Artwork in the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace, Beijing
Traditional Chinese	牛郎織女
Simplified Chinese	牛郎织女
Literal meaning	Cowherd [and] Weaver Girl
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Niúláng Zhīnǚ

The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl meeting on the magpie bridge.

View of the night sky: Vega (Zhinü the weaver-girl) is at top left, Altair (Niulang the cowherd) at lower centre. The heavenly river (Milky Way) separates them.

The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl originated from people’s worship of natural celestial phenomena, and later developed into the Qiqiao or Qixi Festival since the Han Dynasty.^{[5][better source needed]} It has also been celebrated as the Tanabata festival in Japan and the Chilseok festival in Korea.^[6] In ancient times, women would make wishes to the stars of Vega and Altair in the sky during the festival, hoping to have a wise mind, a dexterous hand (in embroidery and other household tasks), and a good marriage.^[7]

The story was selected as one of China's Four Great Folktales by the "Folklore Movement" in the 1920s—the others being the Legend of the White Snake, Lady Meng Jiang, and Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai—but Idema (2012) also notes that this term neglects the variations and therefore diversity of the tales, as only a single version was taken as the true version.^[8][9]

The story of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl and its two main characters are popular in various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with different places adopting different variations. Some historical and cross cultural similarities to other stories have also been observed. The story is referenced in various literary and popular cultural sources.

Literature

The tale has been alluded to in many literary works. One of the most famous was the poem by Qin Guan (秦观; 1049–1100) during the Song dynasty:

鵲橋仙 纖雲弄巧， 飛星傳恨， 銀漢迢迢暗渡。 金風玉露一相逢， 便勝卻人間無數。 柔情似水， 佳期如夢， 忍顧鵲橋歸路。 兩情若是久長時， 又豈在朝朝暮暮。

Meeting across the Milky way Through the varying shapes of the delicate clouds, the sad message of the shooting stars, a silent journey across the Milky Way. One meeting of the Cowherd and Weaver amidst the golden autumn wind and jade-glistening dew, eclipses the countless meetings in the mundane world. The feelings soft as water, the ecstatic moment unreal as a dream, how can one have the heart to go back on the bridge made of magpies? If the two hearts are united forever, why do the two persons need to stay together—day after day, night after night?[10]

Du Fu(杜甫) (712–770) of the Tang dynasty wrote a poem about the heavenly river:

天河 常時任顯晦， 秋至輒分明。 縱被微雲掩， 終能永夜清。 含星動雙闕， 伴月落邊城。 牛女年年渡， 何曾風浪生。

The Heavenly River Most of the time it may be hidden or fully visible, but when autumn comes, it gets immediately bright. Even if covered over by faint clouds, in the long run it can be clear through the long night. Full of stars, it stirs by paired palace gates, moon’s companion, it sinks by a frontier fort. Oxherd and Weaver cross it every year, and when have storms ever arisen thereon?[11]

Analysis

Influence and variations

The story of the cowherd and weaver girl spread across Asia, with different variations appearing in various languages and regions over the course of time. In Southeast Asia, the story has been conflated into a Jataka tale detailing the story of Manohara,^[12] the youngest of seven daughters of the Kinnara King, who lives on Mount Kailash and falls in love with Prince Sudhana.^[13]

In Korea, the story focuses on Jicknyeo, a weaver girl who falls in love with Gyeonwoo, a herder. In Japan, the story revolves around the romance between the deities, Orihime and Hikoboshi. In Vietnam, the story is known as Ngưu Lang Chức Nữ and revolves around the story of Chức Nữ, the weaver, and Ngưu Lang, the herder of buffalos.^{[needs context][14]} The Vietnamese version is also titled The Weaver Fairy and the Buffalo Boy.^[15]

Tale type

In the first catalogue of Chinese folktales (devised in 1937), Wolfram Eberhard abstracted a Chinese folktype indexed as number 34, Schwanenjungfrau ("The Swan Maiden"): a poor human youth is directed to the place where supernatural women bathe by a cow or a deer; the women may be Swan Maidens, a celestial weaver, one of the Pleiades, one of the "9 Celestial Maidens", or a fairy; he steals the garments of one of them and makes her his wife; she finds the garments and flies back to Heaven; the youth goes after her, and meets her in the Heavenly realm; the Heavenly king decrees that the couple shall meet only once a year.^[16] Based on some of the variants available then, Eberhard dated the story to the 5th century, although the tale seems much older, with references to it in the Huainanzi (2nd century BC).^[17] Eberhard also supposed that the fairy tale preceded the astral myth.^[17]

Chinese folklorist and scholar Ting Nai-tung [zh] classified the versions of The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl under the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index ATU 400, "The Quest for the Lost Wife".^[18] The tale also holds similarities with widespread tales of the swan maiden (bird maiden or bird princess).^[19]

Cultural references

• Reference to the story was made by Carl Sagan in his book Contact.^[20]
• Episode 63 of the 1981-1986 Japanese anime Dr. Slump - Arale-chan, based on the manga Dr. Slump by Akira Toriyama, parodies the tale.
• The story, as well as the puppetry shown, was told by Meiying to Dre Parker during the Qi Xi Festival in the film The Karate Kid.
• The tale and the Tanabata festival are also the basis of the Sailor Moon side story entitled "Chibiusa's Picture Diary - Beware the Tanabata!", where both Vega and Altair make an appearance.^[21]
• The post-hardcore band La Dispute named and partially based their first album, Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair, after the tale.
• The JRPG Bravely Second: End Layer also uses the names Vega and Altair for a pair of story-important characters who shared a love interest in each other years before the game's story began, Deneb being their common friend.
• The K-pop girl group Red Velvet's song "One of These Nights" from their 2016 EP The Velvet also references the legend of the two lovers.
• J-pop band Supercell also references the story on its song "Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari".
• The novel Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart is centered around the tale, but incorporates many more Chinese folk stories while retelling the tale.
• Korean girl group Dreamcatcher's song "July 7th" from their EP Alone in the City, is based on this tale.
• The South Korean television series Vincenzo features a reference to the legend of the lovers, in which Vincenzo mixes up the names from the Korean tale.
• In the twelfth Magic Tree House book, "Day of the Dragon King", Jack and Annie save this story from Emperor Qin's book burning, then use it to escape the emperor's mausoleum.
• In The Big Bang Theory, S07E19 "The Indecision Amalgamation", Raj references the story to Penny as a romantic folk tale.
• The K-pop boy group Treasure's song "Bling Like This", the b-side track from their second single album The First Step: Chapter Two is also based on this story.
• The Japanese rock group Alice Nine's song "Heisei Jyuushichinen Shichigatsu Nanoka" from their 2005 EP Alice in Wonderland is based on this story.

Similar to the Chang'e space program being named after the Chinese goddess of the moon, the Queqiao and Queqiao-2 relay satellite is named after the "bridge of magpies" from the Chinese tale of the cowherd and weaver girl.^[22] The Chang'e 4 landing site is known as Statio Tianhe, which refers to the heavenly river in the tale.^[23] The nearby far-side lunar craters Zhinyu and Hegu are named after Chinese constellations associated with the weaver girl and the cowherd.^[23]

In Japan, the Engineering Test Satellite VII mission was an automated rendezvous and docking test of two satellites nicknamed "Orihime" and "Hikoboshi."

Gallery

• 
  Zhinü with a shuttle in her hand, painted by Zhang Ling, Ming dynasty
• 
  Zhinü crossing the River of Heaven, as painted by Gai Qi, 1799
• 
  Zhinü as depicted on the ceiling of Muxuyuan Station, Nanjing.
• 
  Zhinü and Niulang, by the Japanese painter Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.
• 
  Depiction of the creation of the River of Heaven (Milky Way), painted by Guo Xu, Ming dynasty
• 
  Rendezvous in the Milky Way
• 
  The painting of Niulang - Zhinü in the book Vân tiên cổ tích truyện of the Nguyễn dynasty by Lê Đức Trạch

See also

• Qixi Festival
• Tanabata Festival
• Chilseok Festival

References

1. Brown, Ju; Brown, John (2006). China, Japan, Korea: Culture and Customs. North Charleston: BookSurge. p. 72. ISBN 978-1-4196-4893-9.
2. Lai, Sufen Sophia (1999). "Father in Heaven, Mother in Hell: Gender politics in the creation and transformation of Mulian's mother". Presence and presentation: Women in the Chinese Literati Tradition. New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 191. ISBN 978-0312210540.
3. Schomp, Virginia (2009). The Ancient Chinese. New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark. p. 89. ISBN 978-0761442165.
4. Karlgren, Bernhard (1950). The Book of Odes (PDF). Stockholm: Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities.
5. Schomp, Virginia (2009). The Ancient Chinese. New York: Marshall Cavendish Benchmark. p. 70. ISBN 978-0761442165.
6. Hearn, Lafcadio; Rogers, Bruce (1905). The romance of the Milky Way : and other studies & stories. Wellesley College Library. Boston : Houghton Mifflin.
7. "Cultural discourse on Xue Susu, a courtesan in late Ming China". International Journal of Asian Studies; Cambridge.
8. Gao, Jie. Saving the Nation through Culture: The Folklore Movement in Republican China. Contemporary Chinese Studies. University of British Columbia Press.
9. Idema, Wilt L. (2012). "Old Tales for New Times: Some Comments on the Cultural Translation of China's Four Great Folktales in the Twentieth Century" (PDF). Taiwan Journal of East Asian Studies. 9 (1): 26. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-10-06.
10. Qiu, Xiaolong (2003). Treasury of Chinese love poems. New York: Hippocrene Books. p. 133. ISBN 9780781809689.
11. Owen, Stephen [translator & editor], Warner, Ding Xiang [editor], Kroll, Paul [editor] (2016). The Poetry of Du Fu , Volume 2. De Gruyter Mouton. Pages 168–169. ISBN 978-1-5015-0189-0
12. Cornell University (2013). Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University: Fall Bulletin 2013. Page 9. "It is generally accepted that the tale of Manora (Manohara) told in Southeast Asia has become conflated with the story of the cowherd and the celestial Weaver girl, popular in China, Korea, and Japan. This conflation of tales, in which Indian and Chinese concepts of sky nymphs cohere, suggests a consummate example of what historian Oliver Wolters refers to as “localization” in Southeast Asia.
13. Jaini, Padmanabh S. (ed.) (2001). Collected Papers on Buddhist Studies Page 297-330. ISBN 81-208-1776-1.
14. Landes, A. Contes et légendes annamites. Saigon: Imprimerie Coloniale. 1886. p. 125 (footnote nr. 1).
15. Vuong, Lynette Dyer. Sky legends of Vietnam. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 1993. pp. 54-80.ISBN 0-06-023000-2
16. Eberhard, Wolfram (1937). Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications (in German). Vol. 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. pp. 55–57.
17. Eberhard, Wolfram (1937). Typen Chinesischer Volksmärchen. FF Communications (in German). Vol. 120. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica. pp. 58–59.
18. Nai-tung TING. A Type Index of Chinese Folktales in the Oral Tradition and Major Works of Non-religious Classical Literature. (FF Communications, no. 223) Helsinki, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1978. p. 65.
19. Haase, Donald. The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales: A-F. Greenwood Publishing Group. 2007. p. 198.
20. Sagan, Carl (September 1985). Contact. Cover illustration by Jon Lomberg (1st ed.). New York. ISBN 0-671-43400-4. OCLC 12344811.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
21. "Chapter 2 Beware of Tanabata - WikiMoon". wikimoon.org. Retrieved 2021-02-11.
22. Wall, Mike (18 May 2018). "China Launching Relay Satellite Toward Moon's Far Side Sunday". Space. Future plc. Archived 18 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine
23. Bartels, Meghan (15 February 2019). "China's Landing Site on the Far Side of the Moon Now Has a Name". Space. Future plc. Archived 15 February 2019 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading

• Yu, Eric Kwan-wai (1998). "Of Marriage, Labor and the Small Peasant Family: A Morphological and Feminist Study of the Cowherd and Weaving Maid Folktales". Comparative Literature and Culture. 3: 11–51.
• Ping, Xu (2016). "All the way to the Altair and the fable of cowherd and the weaving maiden". Proceedings of the 2016 2nd International Conference on Education Technology, Management and Humanities Science. Atlantis Press. pp. 708–711. doi:10.2991/etmhs-16.2016.156. ISSN 2352-5398.

External links

• Zhao, Shannon (2022). "The myth of the original star-crossed lovers". TED-Ed.