🇹🇼How does Taiwan mark Valentine's Day?

七夕情人節

Local date

August 8, 2027

When is it?

The 7th day of the 7th lunar month

Taiwan has two Valentine's Days: 14 February on the Gregorian calendar and Qixi on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month. Qixi began as the festival of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl and as a day for honouring the bed mother and the Seven Goddesses; only later did the commercial season attach the name 'Valentine's Day' to it. So there are two peaks of restaurant bookings in one year, from two completely different origins — one an imported date, one a lunar festival. Qixi in Taiwan carries a second identity: the birthday of the Seven Mothers, held to be the guardian deity of children. The coming-of-sixteen rite at the Kailong Temple in Tainan takes place on this very day, the sixteen-year-old passing beneath the offering table's paper pavilion to mark adulthood. Two things therefore share one date — a courtship evening at one end, and a family walking its child through a rite of majority at the other, with nothing to do with each other.