The Origin of Qixi Festival
Qixi Festival originates from the earliest worship of the nature. In historical literature, we know that, at least over 3,000 years ago, with the development of astronomy and textile technology, records on the Altair star and the Vega star had emerged. People’s worship to stars is far less restricted to these two, they believe in each direction of east, south, west and north, there are seven stars representing orientations. So the 28 stars in the four directions were called twenty-eight constellations, among which the Big Dipper in the due north is the brightest, and people often used it for determining directions at night. The first star in the Big Dipper is called Kuixing star, also Kuishou star. In later times, there appeared civil examination system, the first winner in palace examination is popularly called Zhuangyuan, or the great winner excelling all scholars under heaven. In this sense, scholars referred to Qixi Festival as Kuixing Festival, or Book Sunning Festival, which obviously bears some evidence that Qixi Festival originates at the first place from star worshiping.
Qixi also originates from people’s worship to time. Seven and time are both pronounced Qi in Chinese, and this festival falls on time where the month and the date are both the seventh, which gives people a sense of coincidence in time. In the ancient time, Chinese people often added the Sun, the Moon, to the five planets – the Mercury, the Mars, the Jupiter, the Venus, the Saturn, and called them the Seven Bright Stars. In terms of folk customs, seven is often regarded as a cycle, and double seven (square of seven) is often considered a completion in calculating matters. In the past of Beijing, when people were organizing mourning services to a diseased person, the full completion days would be double seven (49 days). The ancient Chinese use the term of Seven Bright Stars to name the seven days in a week, whose traces can also be found in Japanese (as Japanese language borrowed a lot from Chinese language and culture). As seven is homophonic to auspicious in Chinese language, double seven implies doubled auspiciousness, which means that Qixi Festival is a fortunate day. In Taiwan, people think that July is a month with happiness and fortune. As the Chinese character happiness in cursive calligraphy is like seventy-seven in figure, so people call birthday celebration of seventy-seven as Happy Birthday.
Qixi Festival is also a phenomenon of number worshiping. In the ancient time, ordinary Chinese treated the following seven doubled-days of January 1, March 3, May 5, July 7, September 9, February 2, and June 6 as fortunate days. Seven is also the number of beads in each column on abacus, so people think it is romantic and meticulous, carrying a mysterious and aesthetic sense. Seven and wife are phonetically identical, as a result Qixi Festival evolved into a matter heavily related to women.
(Source: bjchinese.bjedu.cn)
