Legend has it that the Weaver Girl is a textile goddess who was born on the seventh day of July. She is an ingenious and kind-hearted fairy. In the ancient poems, it is also mentioned that "the Altair is far away, the river is full of beautiful women, the hand is delicate, and the loom is made."
It can be seen that the Weaver Girl is a clever and capable fairy who is skillful in weaving and weaving clouds in the sky. Therefore, whenever the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl meet on Tanabata, the young girls will "worship and pray" and beg for wisdom from the Weaver Girl, so Tanabata is also called the Begging Festival.
Related introduction:
Chinese Valentine's Day, also known as the Begging Festival, originated in the Han Dynasty. Ge Hong's Miscellanies of Xijing in the Eastern Jin Dynasty recorded that "women in the Han Dynasty often put a seven-hole needle on the Kaijin Building on July 7th, and everyone was in Xi Zhi".
The first Begging Festival was not to commemorate the love of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, but to commemorate the Weaver Girl, who was called "Seven Sisters" by the people. Therefore, Chinese Valentine's Day is a women's festival first, and the Weaver Girl is regarded as the goddess of textile, which is the object of ancient women's worship. On the night of the seventh day of July, ordinary women begged her for wisdom and skillful skills, and of course, they would inevitably seek a happy marriage and get a husband.
According to "Tokyo Years Old Record", "Every family on Tanabata is colorful, and it is a clever shed." Its grand occasion can be seen. The activity of "begging for cleverness" is actually begging the Weaver Maid for cleverness.
There was a custom of begging for cleverness in Han dynasty; In the Northern and Southern Dynasties, women tied colorful threads and wore seven-hole needles. In the Tang Dynasty, this custom was particularly popular, in which throwing a needle was used to predict the cleverness of a woman who threw a needle, that is, taking a bowl of clear water and exposing it to sunlight, and then throwing a small needle to float on the water to see the shape of the needle shadow at the bottom of the water.
In the Ming and Qing Dynasties, Chinese Valentine's Day evolved into the "Seven Niangs' Meeting", in which seven girls invited them together, wrapped up all kinds of flower and fruit figures and palace utensils with materials such as medulla tetrapanacis, colored paper and rice flour, and displayed them on the table of the Eight Immortals in front of the court on the evening of Tanabata for tourists to appreciate, and then competed together to wear needles and worship the weaver girl.