Legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl
01 · Historical Records
The Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend has Yiyuan in Shandong, Heshun in Shanxi and Xi'an in Shaanxi among its important areas of circulation, and the legends of the various places are attached to the local hills, waters and scenery, forming distinctive local versions. The legend originated in the pre-Qin period and is one of the most widely current and influential of Chinese folk legends, being named together with the Meng Jiangnü, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai and White Snake legends as the four great folk legends.
02 · Core Techniques & Process
The Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend first appears in the Book of Songs, Minor Odes, Great East, as an artistic imagining of the two stars Shang and Shen, the Cowherd star and the Weaver Girl star, separated by the Milky Way in the vault of heaven. This poetic image was gradually personified by later generations and given humanistic symbolic meaning, turning into the story of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. In basic content and ideological tendency the legend displays the social structure of men ploughing and women weaving under China's agricultural civilisation and the conditions of unfree marriage under the feudal patriarchal system. The love tragedy of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl won the wide sympathy of the people, which became the motive force of the legend's spread and multiplication and also promoted the formation of the Double Seventh custom of seeking skill. People often identify the protagonist of the legend with a real person near them and the place of the events with their own locality, so that many related historical relics have appeared, such as temples, caves and Cowherd villages; Xi'an in Shaanxi, Yiyuan in Shandong and Heshun in Shanxi all have sites related to the legend. The story current in the Yiyuan area is attached to actual hills and place names, giving the legend the double character of oral literature and local scenery legend.
The Weaver Girl Cave
A relic in Yiyuan connected with the Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend.
The Cowherd Temple
A relic in Yiyuan connected with the Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend.
The Double Seventh Custom of Seeking Skill
The Double Seventh custom whose formation was promoted by the Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend.
03 · Regional Records & Related Items
Yiyuan county lies in the mountainous area of central Shandong and is said to be one of the main areas of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend; within its bounds are relics and place names related to the legend such as the Weaver Girl Cave, the Cowherd Temple and Daxian Mountain. The locality combines the legend with the Double Seventh custom of seeking skill and temple fairs and other customs, and a vivid narrative-singing tradition survives to this day in the Yanya area where the Weaver Girl Cave is.
Other submitting regions for the same item: Legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl · Legend of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl.
04 · Cultural Value & Contemporary Safeguarding
For a thousand years this beautiful legend has been handed down from generation to generation, exerting an important influence on folk ethics and the cultural psychology of the masses. In the course of modernisation the spread of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl legend has gradually shown a declining tendency, and protection must urgently be strengthened so that this treasure of national culture may continue to be transmitted. The folk activities formed around the legend locally are vivid material for studying the marriage and love ideas of agricultural society and the Double Seventh custom.
06 · Authoritative Sources & Bibliography
Sources
China Intangible Cultural Heritage Network (ihchina.cn)
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