The heart is the strongest muscle. So it’s fitting to have a day for love the day before China’s world sports party begins. Of course, the Chinese ancients held that the liver was the seat of emotion, but they never had to juxtapose romance and the Olympics.

You are not likely to hear one person bring up that today, the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, is Qixi, Chinese Valentine’s Day. Come next February 14^th, though, Chinese store windows will be plastered with giant paper hearts, and lines of couples will stretch around the block at Pizza Huts across the nation.

So marketing means the end of tradition. It’s a shame, at least in this case. The legend behind Qixi makes a lot more sense than a saint linked to romantic love by virtue of having married a lot of people, much less a winged baby taking pot shots at people with a bow and arrow. More importantly, the story of Qixi shows that, no matter how diverse and creative we’d like to think the family of man, there’s only one love story, Tom Hanks’ and Meg Ryan’s not withstanding.

Thousands of years before the first Frenchman voiced the term cliché, there lived a young cowherd. He was an orphan who had taken shelter with his elder brother, until the latter married a shrew, who hounded her brother-in-law out of the house and into the cow-tending business. As if his station weren’t lowly enough, he had only one cow under his charge. The villagers who scorned him may have changed their minds, however, had they known the cow was a heavenly immortal, sent to earth to atone for some divine transgression.

This bovine fairy godmother empathized with her lonely caretaker, and with her dying breath advised him to save her hide, and then visit the hidden spring where they had passed many an idle day. Doing as he was told, the cowherd discovered seven radiant fairy sisters bathing. Escaping notice, he deftly snatched one of the sister’s raiment from the banks of the limpid pool. When the fairies rose to attire themselves, the sister deprived of her garments had no choice but to search for them, upon which the cowherd stepped forth, proffering both her dress and his hand in marriage.

Naturally, the cowherd was both fair of face and clean of limb, so that the fairy, daughter of the Jade Emperor, was inclined to accept, despite his obviously low status. Custom intervened in their favor – he had seen her naked, after all, therefore convention dictated that they be joined in marriage.

Their brief idyll ended upon the Jade Emperor’s discovery that his daughter, responsible for weaving clouds and rainbows, had failed to return with her sisters. Enraged that she had violated heavenly law by mixing with a mortal, the Emperor sent his wife to fetch her back. Since Chinese girls who disobey their parents are rarer than Western girls who obey theirs, the cowherd’s wife had no choice but to return, whereupon her husband gave chase through the skies, cloaked in his immortal leather jacket.

The Jade Empress, scandalized at his impertinence, removed her silver hairpin and with it rent the heavens, simultaneously blocking the love-struck cowpoke and creating the Milky Way. Meanwhile, a large flock of magpies had been observing this melodrama, and moved by such soap opera- worthy antics, formed a bridge across the starry abyss on which the two could meet. The Empress herself could not ignore such a display of sympathy, and decreed that the literally star-crossed lovers could meet annually on that day, Qixi.

The story has been immortalized by a host of classic Chinese writers, most famously by Song Dynasty poet Qin Guan, who wrote:

Among the beautiful clouds,

Over the heavenly river,

Crosses the weaving maiden.

A night of rendezvous,

Across the autumn sky,

Surpasses joy on earth.

Moments of tender love and dream,

So sad to leave the magpie bridge.

Eternal love between us two,

Shall withstand the time apart.

The Chinese traditions that have sprung up around the story have less to do with chocolates and kisses than with supplicating the cloud-weaving Fairy Princess. While today the rite of romance for young Chinese people involves a pilgrimage to Pizza Hut, not so long ago, on Qixi, a young woman would prepare fruits and incense in offering to Zhi Nu, the divine weaver, hoping for cleverness in needlecraft and luck in finding a husband, hopefully one with a little more clout than Zhi Nu’s husband, Niu Lang (Cowboy).