Legend & Origin
Yue Lao's classic entrance comes on a moonlit night in the Tang dynasty. A young scholar named Wei Gu came upon a white-bearded old man outside an inn, reading an enormous book by moonlight. Curious, Wei Gu asked what it was. 'This,' the old man said, 'is the ledger of every marriage in the world.'
Wei Gu pressed him at once: who was his own match? The old man flipped through the pages and pointed across the street to a grubby little girl in the arms of an old woman. 'Her.' Wei Gu was appalled — small, filthy, nothing like the bride he'd imagined — and in his fury he sent a man to kill her. The assassin lost his nerve and managed only to slash the child across the brow before fleeing.
Fourteen years later, Wei Gu married a beautiful young woman. On their wedding night he noticed a scar between her eyebrows, and when he asked about it, the truth came out: she was that very girl. He had run for fourteen years and traveled a full circle, only to end up at the other end of the red thread. A thousand years on, the story still makes one point: once Yue Lao ties the thread, not even a blade can cut it.