Couples hold a group wedding ceremony in Lushan County, central China's Henan Province, Aug 16, 2010. A total of 77 pairs of newlyweds announced their marriage at the ceremony in Lushan during Qixi Festival, or Chinese Valentine's Day, which is the seventh day of the seventh lunar month and fell on Aug 16 this year. [Xinhua]

Qixi Festival, which fell Monday, was a day when couples rushed to tie the knot, young lovers exchanged flowers and other presents, and unlucky bachelors "cursed" lovers on the Internet.

The festival is the near-Chinese equivalent of Valentine's Day.

The Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau said more than 1,580 couples drew their marriage certificates yesterday, about double the usual number.

Li Jing, a teacher at Shanghai University of Engineering Science, drew her marriage certificate with her husband early yesterday morning, before volunteering at the World Expo site.

Li said that her parents had married on Qixi Festival and she wanted to continue the tradition.

Lu Zhen, 26, who also got married yesterday, recalled that the love affair with his wife had begun from "a bad impression of each other."

"In fact I couldn't even remember her after our first meeting, while she thought I was a bumpkin," recalled Lu.

The Expo site yesterday also was swept by romance. Four couples held their wedding ceremony -- in traditional South Korean style.

Originally, three couples were to be selected, with the only condition being that for each couple one person had to be from South Korea and the other from China.

But the passion among participants prompted the organizers to tweak the rules: They allowed one more couple to enjoy the ultimate prize, which included a wedding ceremony with the bride in a typical South Korean wedding gown and make-up, a photo shoot, a honeymoon on South Korea's Jeju Island, and no preconditions on the nationality of that couple.

Qixi was also a day for the flower business to blossom in the city.

"I designed a special bouquet of roses, which was very popular," said a store owner surnamed Li who runs his business on Shimen No. 1 Road, predicting the day's income "will be about two to three times my normal take."

Down with love

The day, however, was not to everyone's liking. Some disgruntled bachelors organized a group called "Lovers-Go-Damn," threatening to break up as many lovers as they could on the festival day.

The bachelors launched a website that became a forum for single persons to vent their feelings and offer ideas on how to spoil a date. Among the ideas: crushing chocolates to pulp and puncturing condoms sold in supermarkets.

Despite the malice, these ideas were in jest, meant to assuage the bachelors' feelings of loneliness. "We just wanted to have fun by ourselves using our imagination. We would never dream of doing anything so crazy," said a group organizer whose online ID was "Aoi."

Experts said the Qixi Festival is actually very different from Valentine's Day. It is a festival that expresses a married couple's responsibility to family.

"In the Qixi fairy tale, Niu Lang and Zhi Nu are a married couple, and what they want most is a stable family life," said Gu Xiaoming, a history professor with Fudan University.

Qixi falls on the seventh day of the seventh month in the Chinese lunar calendar. The origin of the festival is a fairy tale about a common farmer and a heavenly fairy. Their love was not blessed by the gods and they were separated by the Milky Way. They could meet each other only once a year -- on Qixi Festival.