What is 'Chinese Valentine's Day' Food, Traditionally?

On the 7th day of the 7th lunar month – coming up this August 29th – throngs of couples will celebrate Qixi, commonly translated as “Chinese Valentine’s Day”. For a flower shop, it’s one of the busiest days of the year. Ditto for a western restaurant, or any similarly photogenic ‘romantic’ restaurant. Across Chinese social media, you’ll find scores of posts of dudes surprising their girlfriends with gifts of bouquets, jewelry, or even the deed to a house.

It is, in short, a Chinese Valentine’s Day.

But it didn’t always used to be this way.

The transition was relatively recent. When I (Steph) was in high school in the early 00s, nobody really celebrated Qixi – in urban Guangdong, it was one among a myriad of minor traditional holidays that wasn’t really observed anymore. But consumerism often finds a way of squeezing lead into gold, and when I was in college the first inklings of Qixi’s ‘new meaning’ began to emerge. By the time I moved to Shenzhen in 2011, pretty much the entire city was celebrating the day as a full blown Valentine’s Day.

And as someone that’s always been interested in Chinese history and literature, this metamorphosis frankly pissed me off.

Because say what you will about Valentine’s Day in the west – I do agree with many of the feminist critiques – at the very least the modern incarnation jives with how it was traditionally celebrated. As I understand it, the origins of Valentine’s Day in the west were rather murky, but have been connected to romantic love since the early modern period, and already became a sensation in Victorian times.

But traditional Qixi celebrations in China had nothing to do with the modern ‘date night’ cliché. It was a female holiday... and the descriptions of how it was celebrated sound like a ton of fun.