The Weaver and the Cowherd

Vega and Altair sit on opposite banks of the Milky Way. In Chinese tradition they are the Weaver and the Cowherd, lovers allowed to meet once a year. The stars appear long before the love story does.

A complaint to the stars

An early mention is in the Book of Poetry, the Shijing, a collection compiled between the 11th and 8th centuries BCE (opens in a new tab). In the ode Tâ Tung, as James Legge translated it in 1879 (opens in a new tab), an officer of the eastern states complains of the government's demands and turns to the sky. The Weaving Sisters pass through their seven stages but "complete no bright work"; the Draught Oxen shine but do not draw carts; in the north the Ladle, the Dipper, lades out no liquor. The stars are tools that do no work.

Which stars

Legge's notes (opens in a new tab) identify the Weaving Sisters as three stars in Lyra that form a triangle, Vega and its two neighbours, and the Draught Oxen as stars in the neck of Aquila, around Altair.

From stars to lovers

As Huailin Mu of Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (opens in a new tab) points out, the poem treats the cowherd and the weaver simply as stars; over the centuries poets and storytellers gave them human lives. In the story that grew, the weaver (Vega) and the cowherd (Altair) (opens in a new tab) are parted by the river of the Milky Way and meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, over a bridge made of magpies.

Qixi

That night is the Qixi festival. One old custom was threading needles (opens in a new tab), which girls practised to ask the Weaver for skill in craft.

The astronomy

The two stars will not meet. Vega is 25.3 light-years (opens in a new tab) from us and Altair 16.8, and by this site's calculation they are about 34° apart on the sky, with the Milky Way between them. With Deneb they make the Summer Triangle.