The City Flourishing, Tanabata Festival, No. 73 from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo

The Tanabata Festival, celebrated annually on the seventh day of the Seventh Month, derived from an ancient Chinese legend about the Celestial Weaving Girl (the star Vega) who crosses the Milky Way once a year to meet her beloved Cowherd (Altair). By the late Edo period, the Festival had developed into a huge outdoor display of inscribed, multicolored sheets of paper and auspicious paper symbols attached to long green bamboo poles. Although this is the only print in the series that does not specify a place in the title, it represents the view from a very specific, very personal place: Hiroshige's own house.