Yue Lao 月老
Yue Lao has a marriage ledger and a bag of red threads. In the old tale, the man whose marriage he foretells does everything to prevent it, and only years later learns that the old man was right. Taiwanese cinema has used the same legend differently. There, people can be matchmade even by someone who was recently in love himself and still hopes to win back his former life.
The tale of Yue Lao (月老) is told in the legend of Wei Gu, preserved in the Song dynasty collection Taiping Guangji. Wei Gu wishes to marry, but his matchmaking comes to nothing. One night, in the moonlight, he sees an old man reading a book. The old man explains that the book records future marriages, and that with the red cords from his bag he binds together the feet of those destined to become husband and wife. The elder foretells that Wei Gu will marry the daughter of a vegetable seller. The girl is only three years old.
Wei Gu tries to prevent the prophecy from coming true. He sends a servant to kill the child, but the servant only wounds the girl above the eyebrow. Many years later, Wei Gu marries a girl from an official's family and notices a scar on her. It turns out that she is that very girl. The meaning of the legend is that a fated marriage will come to pass even if a person does everything in their power to avoid it. This encounter in the moonlight gave rise to the name Yue Lao ("Old Man under the Moon"), and the red thread became the recognizable symbol of a marriage union.
In the series Seven Fairies (2005), Yue Lao was played by Ma Chong-Le. In Giddens Ko's film Till We Meet Again (2021), one can become Yue Lao in the afterlife. The protagonist, played by Kai Ko, and his partner, played by Gingle Wang, return to the living to arrange other people's marriages. The hero himself has not yet remembered everything about the one he loved in life.
