Yue Lao
Taoist god of marriage and love in Chinese folk religion
Yue Lao (Chinese: 月下老人; pinyin: Yuè Xià Lǎorén; lit. 'old man under the moon') is a god of marriage and love in Chinese mythology. He appears as an old man under the moon.
Yue Lao appears at night and "unites with a silken cord all predestined couples, after which nothing can prevent their union." He is immortal and is said to live either in the moon or in the "obscure regions" (Yue ming), the Chinese equivalent of Hades. His legends serve as the basis for the Red thread of fate.
Legend
A legend is told about the old man under the moon. During the Tang dynasty, there was a young man named Wei Gu (韋固; Wéi Gù). Once he was passing the city of Songcheng, where he saw an old man leaning on his pack reading a book in the moonlight. Amazed by this, Wei Gu walked up and asked what he was doing. The old man answered: "I am reading a book of marriage listing for who is going to marry whom.
The public source identifies “Yue Lao” as taoist god of marriage and love in Chinese folk religion. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Taoist, marriage and love.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yue Lao” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.