The pantheon · Folk Deities (民間信仰)
Yue Lao
月老 · Yue Lao (Wade-Giles: Yüeh-lao)
Folk religion
The old man under the moon who ties the red thread of marriage.
A folk matchmaker god who binds destined couples with an invisible red cord. His full name, Yuexia Laoren, means the old man beneath the moon, and he governs marital affinity rather than romance in general.
- Portfolio
- Marriage · Matchmaking · Romantic affinity (yuanfen)
- Observance
- Yue Lao is petitioned year round rather than on a single feast day, though the seventh night of the seventh lunar month — Qixi, the tradition's day for lovers — draws the largest crowds to his shrines. Customary practice at temples such as Taipei's Xiahai varies from place to place, but often runs: light incense, state your own name, birth date and address so the god can find you, describe the kind of partner you hope for, and cast moon-shaped divination blocks to ask whether he will help. Those who receive his assent may take home a red thread to carry until they meet someone, and tradition asks that they return to give thanks afterward. None of this is uniform; every temple keeps its own house style.
How to recognise them
A white-bearded elder seated in moonlight, holding a book of marriages in one hand and a bundle of red cords in the other. The book lists every fated pairing; the cord is what he ties, unseen, around the ankles of two people who will one day marry, however far apart they are born.
Yue Lao first appears in a Tang-dynasty collection of strange tales, the Xu Xuanguai Lu, in a story called The Inn of Betrothal. A traveller named Wei Gu meets an old man reading a book by moonlight beside a bag of red cords. Asked what they are for, the old man says the book records the marriages of the world, and the cords bind the feet of husband and wife-to-be; once tied, nothing — distance, rank, enmity between families — can undo the match.
The story does not end sweetly, and that is the point. The old man tells Wei Gu that his own future wife is at that moment a toddler, the ugly daughter of a one-eyed vegetable seller in the market. Offended, Wei Gu pays a servant to stab the child. The knife only grazes her brow. Fourteen years later Wei Gu marries a beautiful official's daughter — who wears a flower ornament over an old scar between her eyebrows. She is the same girl.
From this grim little parable grew one of the most beloved figures in Chinese popular religion. Couples and single people alike petition Yue Lao at temples — the Xiahai City God Temple in Taipei keeps a famous shrine — leaving offerings and sometimes carrying away a red thread to keep. The tradition frames him as the keeper of yuanfen, the affinity that brings two lives into contact. Whether the contact becomes a good marriage, the stories are careful to say, is left to the two people involved.
Keep a lamp
Yuelao Lamp
Kept for bonds and matches, after Yuelao, who is said to tie the red thread.
Open the hallNearby
Written from
- Xu Xuanguai Lu (Sequel to the Records of the Mysterious and Strange) — Li Fuyan
- Chinese Gods: The Unseen World of Spirits and Demons — Keith Stevens, 1997
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