Let’s Explore Poetry, Prose, and Song in honor of Chinese Valentine’s Day, Qixi

This month's exploration of historical storytelling legacies and contemporary voices take us to China, which celebrates the Qixi Festival (Chinese Valentine's Day) on August 19.

Global Voices, curated by Rozella Kennedy

August, 2026: Across cultures and across time, words and stories have taught us how to survive, thrive, and make meaning of life. Long before the printed page, communities used speech, song, theater, ritual, and other living forms to pass along knowledge, resist oppression, celebrate joy, and hold memory. Today, we inherit those living hybrids of history, legacy, literature, poetry, and culture, and we can keep them alive through new interpretations and creative practice.

This month’s exploration of historical storytelling legacies and contemporary voices take us to China, which celebrates the Qixi Festival (Chinese Valentine’s Day) on August 19.

Qixi dates back to the Han Dynasty, over 2,000 years ago, and while it’s increasingly commercialized in many places to compete with “Western” Valentine’s Day, it hearkens back to a beautiful folk tale.

Once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, a cowherd named Niulang and his love, a weaver girl named Zhinü, reunite on a bridge made of magpies. Separated across the Milky Way for the rest of the year, they are granted just this one night together, an operatic love story for the ages.

The reunion of the Weaver Girl and the Cowherd on the bridge of magpies

The reunion of the couple of The Weaver Girl and the Cowherd on the bridge of magpies. Artwork in the Long Corridor of the Summer Palace in Beijing. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Qixi originally centered on women who would pray to the spirit of Zhinü for excellent needlework skill and a good love match (I’m supposing the former influenced the latter), but today the holiday is more casual, involving flowers, special dinners, and sweet nothings, similarly to much of North America, Europe, and increasingly parts of Asia and Latin America. In Guangdong’s Wangniudun, there is a folk-craft tradition called the Qixi Tribute, where villagers build elaborate offerings to the Weaver Girl and her six sister-goddesses out of rice, garlic husk, and melon seed. The celebration closes with a “Love Concert” of local bands and singers, showing how contemporary pop music derives from the oldest folk observances.

Qixi is a cultural celebration and not a public holiday, though it was added to China’s National Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2015. In homage to this important holiday, I focused August’s literary excursion into China and its millennia-long relationship between the spoken and sung word and the written page. It all begins with the pipa, a lute-like instrument brought to China through the Silk Road.

From the Pipa to the Page: Stories, Sung and Spoken

In Chinese culture, sound, spoken performance, and text have intertwined over millennia. Oral histories, with their distinctive cadence and musicality, survive in the writing of many celebrated Chinese authors, making their way to us even across translation.

At the root of this melding of storytelling and oral history is an instrument called the pipa, an instrument that originated in Persia and traveled to China along the Silk Road during the Han Dynasty. It took its familiar form by the Jin Dynasty (4th–5th century) and reached its golden age under the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when it anchored imperial court music, connected to Buddhist ritual, and spread from palaces to rural taverns. The instrument was played and held differently across China’s regions, and distinct storytelling traditions grew up around it relative to the geography: in some places the pipa accompanied sung narrative, tanci; in others, it gave way to purely spoken narrative, pinghua, or to drums instead of strings. In teahouses and public venues, forms like shuōshu and píngshū emphasized pacing, voice, and episodic suspense, often built around heroic epics. Nanyin, the pipa-centered ensemble tradition of Fujian’s Minnan communities, was inscribed as an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in 2009, prized as “the sound of the motherland” for people in this region of China and across Southeast Asia.

Dunhuang Cave 220 pipa mural, Early Tang Dynasty

Dunhuang Cave 220, south wall. Pipa. South wall of cave. Early Tang Dynasty (618-907), unknown artist. Source: Wikimedia

Tang poetry, which flourished, obviously, during the Tang Dynasty (618–907) as China’s classical golden age of verse, is a script for voice and memory, composed for oral recitation and social occasion as much as for the page. Historic poets of note include Bai Juyi (772–846), whose “The Song of Everlasting Sorrow” set a template for narrative verse steeped in longing, and Wang Wei (701–761), whose landscape and contemplative lyrics turned nature into meditation. Across China’s regions and millennia, music, spoken word, and the written page have, like our fateful lovers, come together and moved apart in a perennial flow of cadence, emotion, and meaning.

I also learned a bit about ci, the lyric form Li Qingzhao helped perfect. Unlike shi, the classical Tang verse form, ci poems were written to fit one of roughly 800 existing tunes, called cipai, each with its own fixed line lengths, rhyme scheme, and tonal pattern. (Sort of like a songwriter today setting new lyrics to an existing melody or chord progression.) In this way, the “poem” was the song’s lyrics well before it was ever a page of text. Tang poetry, similarly, was composed for recitation and social occasion, with the written character always secondary to the sung or spoken line.

Pipa in Music

The pipa is a star player in new music circles, and artists familiar to me. Wu Man, the instrument’s leading ambassador, has commissioned and premiered works by Tan Dun (Ghost Opera, Pipa Concerto), Bright Sheng, Zhao Jiping (Pipa Concerto No. 2), Zhou Long, and Western composers Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass. Two women composers, Chen Yi and Bun-Ching Lam, are major voices fusing pipa timbre with Western concert forms.

Pipa is also prevalent in pop music, and not just thematically; it’s audible in the productions themselves. Jay Chou’s China Wind songs run on it: 曜風破 (East Wind Breaks), his 2003 breakthrough, built its melody around the instrument, its plucked strings triggering the song’s central image of a memory that won’t let go; 飛如雪 (Hair Like Snow) layered pipa alongside the yangqin for a similar effect; and 告白気球 (Love Confession) closes the loop entirely, classical diction set to melody and built from traditional instrumentation in a pop song, which is functionally what Li Qingzhao was doing 900 years earlier, just without modern production values!

Wang Leehom went further still, folding the pipa into his “chinked-out” (sic) R&B fusion sound and collaborating directly with pipa virtuoso Liu Fang on What’s Up with Rock?!, setting electric guitar against pipa strings rather than treating the instrument as a nostalgic garnish. What a long life for this Silk Road instrument: proof that writer, singer, performer, audience, and reader can all be united in experience.

Song Sensitivity in Fiction

Fiction had produced classics since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, but didn’t outrank poetry in prestige until the May Fourth Movement of the 1910s–20s. Once it became the dominant form, prose writers carried that oral sensitivity forward. Mo Yan, who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy called “hallucinatory realism” that “merges folk tales, history and the contemporary,” channels village storytellers’ directness into novels like Red Sorghum and Big Breasts and Wide Hips. Yu Hua does something similar in To Live, which follows one family through civil war, famine, and the Cultural Revolution; banned in China before it became an international sensation, it later inspired Zhang Yimou’s award-winning film. (I have not seen the film, but I adored this gorgeous, gripping book, itself a form of oral history put to page, and devoured it in two days).

Eileen Chang’s dialogue-driven realism, situates love and loss into 1940s Shanghai in her book Love in a Fallen City. The New York Times has called her “a giant of modern Chinese literature,” and critic C.T. Hsia considered her “the most gifted Chinese writer to emerge in the forties, and certainly the most important,” and named her work The Golden Cangue (collected in the same volume as Love in a Fallen City) “the greatest novelette in the history of Chinese literature.”

Can Xue (b. 1953) pushes fiction toward dream-logic and parable in books like Five Spice Street and Frontier that read as if someone’s speaking to you directly; critics call her “peerless” among writers of experimental Chinese fiction. Born Deng Xiaohua, she wrote under a gender-neutral pen name so that she would not be hindered as a writer. Once her identity became known, some critics were mightily uncomfortable with a woman writing subversive, avant-garde fiction. And yet, she remains a perennial Nobel Prize contender.

Listen / learn

Some online resources you can explore

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As a member of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival’s Bridge Builders Committee, I curate a short monthly series for the Festival’s newsletter highlighting Global Voices. That brief overview is published in English and Spanish in the newsletter; the longer essays publish here, in English. Reality Check: While I have not and cannot read all the books I refer to, I am savoring the discoveries as I read, listen, watch, and explore what I can on this global cultural voyage. That’s the spirit of this venture, so I hope it brings you some discovery, delight, and appreciation for our wonderful world of creative people and traditions. I’m also the founder of Brave Sis Project, and reside in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.