The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl Across the Milky Way

In heaven, the Weaver Girl weaves the clouds.

She sits at her loom in the eastern sky and her shuttle moves through the threads of mist and the fabric she produces is the sky’s changing weather — the thin cirrus of fair days, the heavy cumulus of coming storms, the particular orange and rose of sunset. She is skilled. She is divine. She is also, for a creature whose job is to make the most beautiful fabric in existence, profoundly bored.

She comes down to earth one afternoon with six other heavenly maidens to bathe in a lake the color of jade. The cowherd Niulang is watching from behind the willow trees. He is a poor orphan, mistreated by his brother and sister-in-law, whose only friend is an ancient talking ox that is actually a god who has been demoted to bovine form as punishment for a heavenly transgression. The ox told him the maidens would come. The ox tells him to steal the Weaver Girl’s clothes while she bathes.

This is not a romantic beginning. The tradition knows this and does not apologize for it. Niulang takes the clothes. The other maidens fly away. The Weaver Girl is left naked in the lake, unable to return to heaven, looking at the young man holding her garments, negotiating.

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They marry.

This part the texts dwell on with affection. They are very happy. She comes down completely — learns to plant vegetables, weave cloth from hemp instead of cloud-fiber, cook on a clay stove, carry water from the well. He continues to tend his ox. They have two children who fall asleep in his arms when he carries them in the evening. The weaving she does now is ordinary weaving, mortal fabric, and she finds that she loves it more than the divine kind because the people who wear it are cold before she makes it and warm after, and she can see that.

Three years. Seven years. Ten years. The texts are not consistent about how long. However long it is, it ends the same way.

The Queen Mother of the West comes down from heaven herself — or she sends divine soldiers, depending on the version — and takes the Weaver Girl back. The children reach for their mother. Niulang runs after the soldiers with his children in the two baskets hanging from his carrying pole. The ox, dying, tells him to use its hide as a celestial cloak — that the hide will carry him to heaven.

He reaches heaven. He is almost close enough to touch her hand.

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The Queen Mother of the West takes her hairpin from her hair and draws a line across the sky between them. The line becomes a river — the Silver River, the Milky Way — wide and swift and impassable, a river of light that has no banks and no bottom and no ford. Niulang stands on one side with the children in their baskets. Zhinü stands on the other side with her hands outstretched across the brightness.

The magpies take pity on them. Every year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, all the magpies in China fly up to heaven together and gather so tightly over the Silver River that they form a bridge — a bridge made of birds, a black-and-white road across the Milky Way — and on that night the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl cross to each other and meet in the middle of the bridge and the people below look up at the sky on the seventh night of the seventh month and think of everyone they love who is far away.

They meet for one night. Then the magpies disperse and the river flows again between them.

The Weaver Girl returns to her loom in the eastern sky and weaves the clouds again, and people who watch the sky carefully say that the clouds in the days just after the seventh month are particularly beautiful — that she weaves best in the days after she has seen him, when her hands remember what they held and try to make something that matches it.

The stars Altair and Vega are theirs. The Milky Way is the river between them. The year itself, the rotation of the seasons that brings the seventh month back around, is the mechanism of their reunion. Look at the summer sky. They are there, separated by exactly the distance that makes you want to reach across it.