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if they were already engaged to be married, to exchange gifts with their future affinal relatives. Flower Dawn was a day which marked young girls' attainment of womanhood. Ears were pierced for wearing jewellery and from this day, marking the same shift, adolescent women let their hair grow long to announce their entry into the world of female concerns.
Early spring in the plains and hills of Hubei and Hunan was a period of beginnings and anticipations. The return of life force in Nature was a process drawing from symbolic codes and involving various rituals, as well as giving rise to a sequence of practical concerns in the mundane work in the rice fields. It is in these spring days that we find the celebration of two different festivals, each in its own way attuned to the season: the festivals can be seen as mutually complementary, the two handling different dimensions of the same world.
The ritual activities on this day reflected a social grammar of reciprocity in which gifts—meat and wine—were expected to generate a response from the She. The counter-gift would be an abundance of rice in the fields in late summer. A cognate ritual procedure would be staged some weeks later, but this time the rites would engage the mortal remains of the individual dead and the combinations of ancestral graves that formed the stock of memorabilia of particular lineages. These rituals would aim at a similarly beneficial effect on the coming crops, but would also be forward-looking, inviting the dead to return to the living in early summer.
The She Day was celebrated on a date calculated according to the sun's movement through the celestial zodiac, a procedure providing a relatively stable seasonal appearance. Its ritual liturgy related the occasion to the yin cosmic principle and stressed a downward direction, further associated with female forces, darkness and death. It is interesting that this festival of clear yin associations was calculated in accordance with the movement of the sun, the foremost exposition of the male, life-giving and celestial cosmic principle of yang. The festival appeared on the first wu day after the Li Chun day. Wu is, as already mentioned, the seventh of the 'Earthly Branches,' which, apart from being used to represent cyclical time, was associated with the midday hour and the southerly direction. It seems that a conventional calendar discourse, by the use of the wu branch, tied celestial progress