This Wednesday, the flowers arrive. Restaurants fill up, chocolate gets wrapped in red, and every screen fills with couples. Qixi has been sold as the Chinese Valentine's Day for long enough that most people assume that is simply what it is.
Go to Zhucun Village in Guangzhou that morning and you find something the marketing never mentions.
The village is holding a ceremony, and what is being asked for is skill. A steady hand. A good eye. The ability to make something well.
That is not a local eccentricity. It is the festival's older name. Qixi is also called Qiqiao, which means roughly "begging for skills", and in Zhucun, in Guangzhou's Tianhe District, that meaning is still the point of the day. New clothes are laid out, incense is lit, fruit and flowers are set down, and the prayers are addressed to a star: Vega, known in Chinese folklore as Zhinv, the weaver.
The romance is not invented. The story behind the day is two thousand years old and genuinely lovely — Zhinv the weaver and Niulang the cowherd fall in love, are separated by the Milky Way, and are allowed one night a year, when magpies crowd together into a bridge across the sky so the two can meet.
But look at what those two characters do for a living. One herds cattle. One weaves cloth. In the world that produced the story, they are not a prince and a princess. They are the two people whose work keeps a household alive. It is a love story in which both leads are known, first of all, for being extremely good at what they do.
Which is why the village also holds Baiqiao — roughly, "showing the skills". A long table goes up in the Pan Clan ancestral hall, and everyone puts their handiwork on it, made by men and women alike: whatever they have spent the year building.
The subjects are where it gets fun. Scenes from Cantonese opera. A model of the village gate. And the Canton Tower — the enormous twisting television tower on the riverbank — painstakingly rebuilt by hand in a craft tradition older than most countries. There is something very cheerful about a two-thousand-year-old festival in which somebody looks at the local skyscraper and decides to reproduce it in thread and paper.
Elsewhere in the province, Wednesday takes other shapes, and they are all, one way or another, about hands.
Hakka communities collect water on Qixi from springs, streams and wells, and keep it. It is called Qixi water. The story attached to it in Huizhou says seven goddesses come down to bathe in the rivers that day, which is held to leave the water blessed and protective.
In Foshan, people make wax gourd juice: the gourd is chopped, packed into clay pots and sealed. Then it sits. Whatever you make of the tonic properties locals attribute to it, consider the mindset behind the calendar — a pot sealed this Wednesday is opened in 2029.
Shiwan, a district of Foshan, was for generations a town of potters, and pottery is work that needs strong arms. So on Qixi people there made ducklings: sticky rice flour and water, shaped and steamed, then tucked into little nests of straw. In the evening the nests were floated on the water with incense burning, and the wish was for children who would grow up healthy — able to walk, run and swim as freely as a duck.
In the Chaoshan region, Qixi is the traditional day for a coming-of-age ceremony with the best name in the calendar. Chu Hua Yuan, literally "out of the garden": the child has grown, and no longer plays only in the garden. The family marks it by cooking a special adult's meal.
Chaoshan families call their daughters Zouzai, and the seventh day of the seventh month is the usual date for the Zouzai fair — the day married daughters come back to the house they grew up in, husbands and children in tow. They used to bring sweet peanut and pig's trotter soup, or lotus seed soup. These days it tends to be dried delicacies chosen for their lucky names.
Put it all side by side and a pattern appears. Water that will not be drunk for three years. Ducklings floated for a child's future strength. A meal that says you are not a child anymore. A table of handmade things in an ancestral hall. Every one of these is about time, patience, and getting better at something.
None of which cancels the roses. Two thousand years is long enough for a day to carry more than one meaning, and a festival built on a once-a-year reunion has every right to be about love.
It is just worth knowing, on Wednesday, that the older wish was not for something to arrive. It was for something to be earned.