Yue Lao- Chinese GodDeity"Matchmaker God"
Also known as: 月老, Yuè Lǎo, Yue Xia Laoren, and 月下老人
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Description
The Old Man Under the Moon, divine matchmaker who sits in moonlight with a book of every marriage that will ever be and a sack of red thread. He ties one end to each destined spouse's ankle, and no distance, no obstacle, no passage of years can break it. The thread will draw them together in the end.
Mythology & Lore
The Red Thread
Yue Lao, the Old Man Under the Moon, sits by moonlight with two things: a great book recording every destined marriage, and a sack full of red thread. Before two people ever meet, sometimes before they are even born, he ties a red cord to each of their ankles. The thread may stretch across provinces and decades, tangling through the events of two separate lives, but it cannot break. Sooner or later it draws the two together, and the marriage written in his book comes to pass.
Wei Gu and the Girl in the Market
The Tang dynasty tale of Wei Gu, preserved in Li Fuyan's Xu youguai lu, is the earliest attested account of Yue Lao. One night, the young Wei Gu encountered an old man sitting under the moon, reading a book by the glow of a strange sack. Wei asked what the book contained. The old man explained: it was the registry of marriages, every destined union in the world recorded on its pages. In his sack were the red cords he tied between future spouses.
Wei asked about his own fate. The old man consulted the book and told him his destined wife was a three-year-old girl, daughter of a poor vegetable seller in the market. Wei was horrified. He was a scholar of ambition, and the match was beneath him in every way he could imagine. He sent a servant to kill the child. The servant found the girl and stabbed her, but only managed to wound her forehead before fleeing.
Fourteen years passed. Wei Gu prospered and married a woman of great beauty, the adopted daughter of a prominent governor. On their wedding night, he noticed a small scar on her brow. When he asked about it, she told him: as a child, she had been the daughter of a vegetable seller. A stranger had attacked her in the market, wounding her forehead. The governor had taken pity on her and raised her as his own.
The red thread had held. The girl he had tried to kill had become the wife the old man had promised him, and no act of Wei Gu's, not even attempted murder, had been enough to sever what Yue Lao had tied.
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- Serves