Here are the four most famous love stories in Chinese folklore, passed down over thousands of years. Growing up, I was told these stories before I ever heard of Romeo and Juliet, Paris and Helen, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and I wanted to tell them to you.
1. The Cowherd and the Weaver
The Weaver was a fairy who wove the colours of the sunset every day, and when she grew bored of the chore, she escaped to Earth and fell in love with a cowherd. She married him without permission, and the gods and goddesses, angered by her misbehaviour, separated them and forced her back to Heaven. They allowed her to reunite with the cowherd once a year on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, and to close the distance between them, a flock of magpies would form a bridge so the lovers could reach each other and spend the day together. The Weaver is the star Vega and the Cowherd is the star Altair — you can see them most clearly in the summertime.
2. The Butterfly Lovers
Zhu Yingtai was a young woman who loved poetry and desperately wanted an education, but girls weren’t afforded this at the time, so she cross-dressed as a boy and set out for school. Along the way, she met and fell in love with Liang Shanbo, a young man attending the same school. They became best friends and were inseparable for the next three years. Shanbo never thought Yingtai had feelings for him until she was rushed home for an arranged marriage; this is when he realised he was in love with her, too, but when he arrived at her home, she was already wed to someone else. When Shanbo later fell sick and passed away, Yingtai buried herself with him, and soon after, two butterflies flew out of the grave.
(Don’t listen to anyone who calls this ‘the Chinese version of Romeo and Juliet’! Literature about Yingtai and Shanbo dates back to around 700AD, and Romeo and Juliet was written almost nine hundred years later.)
3. Meng Jiangnu
At their wedding, Meng Jiangnu’s husband was taken away and forced to help build the Great Wall of China. The weather got colder and Meng Jiangnu still hadn’t heard from him, so she traveled all the way to the foot of the Great Wall in search of him. When she arrived, she was told that her husband had died while working, as countless other men had. She wept until her tears flooded the Great Wall and toppled eight hundred miles of it, uncovering her husband’s bones.
(Remember her the next time you think you cry too much.)
4. The White Snake
A white snake spent a thousand years learning to be human, eventually transforming into a beautiful woman. She wanted to thank a scholar for saving her in a past life and sought to find him, and they eventually fell in love and wed. He later found out the truth about her identity, and there are many iterations of how this legend ends, but I always liked to think that they lived happily ever after anyway.