Tanabata originated from people's worship of nature and also from ancient people's worship of time.
In the poems of Tang and Song Dynasties, women's begging for cleverness has also been repeatedly mentioned. In the Tang Dynasty, Wang Jian said in a poem that "the stars are studded with pearls, and the palace moths on Qixi are busy with begging for cleverness". According to "The Legacy of Kaiyuan Tianbao", every time Emperor Taizong and his concubines had a banquet in the Qing Palace on Tanabata, the ladies-in-waiting begged for their own ingenuity. This custom was also enduring among the people and continued from generation to generation.
On the occasion of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Qiaqiao was quite grand, and there was also a market in the capital that monopolized Qiaqiao items, which was called Qiaqiao City by the world. Song Luoye and Jin Ying's series "Talk about Drunken Weng" said: "On Tanabata, Panlou bought and sold gimmicks. From July 1 ST, the horses and chariots swallowed, and three days before the Qixi Festival, the horses and chariots were not allowed to pass, and they stopped again and again, and they did not get it until the night. " Here, we can infer the lively scene of Qiqiao Festival at that time from the grand occasion of buying Qiqiao objects from Qiqiao City. People began to set up articles for begging for cleverness from the first day of July, and the market for begging for cleverness was full of traffic and people. By the time of Tanabata, the market for begging for cleverness had become a sea of people, and it seemed as if it was the biggest festival-Spring Festival, which showed that the festival for begging for cleverness was one of the favorite festivals of the ancients.
After the love story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Maid was integrated into the Begging Festival, the folk girls believed it, so every seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when the Cowherd and the Weaver Maid were at the "Magpie Bridge Meeting", the girls would come to the flowers and look up at the stars, looking for the Cowherd and the Weaver Maid on both sides of the Milky Way, hoping to see their annual meeting, begging God to make themselves as ingenious as the Weaver Maid, and praying that they could have a satisfactory and happy marriage over time.
On May 20th, 2006, Chinese Valentine's Day was included in the first batch of national intangible cultural heritage list by the State Council. Now it is considered as "Valentine's Day in China".