Yue Lao: The matchmaking god

You are destined to marry that person!

It doesn't matter if the person in question is a friend or an enemy. They might be pretty/handsome, or hideously ugly. They could be healthy, or on death's door. What really matters is whether your ankles are tied to theirs with a red string, invisible to human eyes.

What, you don't agree?

In what is perhaps a personification of the concept of fate, Chinese traditional beliefs tell of a matchmaking god named Yue Lao (月老), which literally translates to "old man under the moon", who was said to be in charge of all the marriages with his magic red strings. According to this tale, who you fall in love with was decided the moment you were born.

The character of Yue Lao originated from a story in The Sequel to the Collection of Mysteries, a book of mythology from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). The tale begins with young scholar Wei Gu, who one day decided to visit his friend in Qinghe. On the way, he stayed at an inn.

Another man, surnamed Zhang, who lived in the same area, heard that Wei was a bachelor, so with Wei's consent he decided to arrange a meeting with a girl surnamed Pan, whose father was the former mayor of Qinghe. Wei and Zhang made an appointment to meet at the gate of a temple early the next day to inform Wei whether the girl was interested.

Wei awoke before sunrise to go and meet the matchmaker. But on his way there he met an old man with a white beard and hair, who was lying down on a bag and reading a book under the moon.

Wei took a glance at the book and surprisingly found that he couldn't recognize even a single word.

He approached and asked what book it was. It was then that the old man told him that it was a magic book recording all the marriages in the human world.

Naturally, Wei was skeptical. So the old man took out some red strings from his bag and explained that people were all tied up with their partners as soon as they were born, no matter how far they lived from each other or how differently they were raised, and that they were all fated to eventually become husband and wife.

Wei's first question was of course, who was destined to be his wife.