Singles' Day

Singles’ Day 光棍节 (guānggùn jié) is 11 November — four ones, “bare sticks”, a student nickname for people without a partner. In the 1990s it was a campus joke. From 2009 Alibaba turned 11.11 into a shopping festival; other platforms followed. It is now the largest retail day in China, and a date the rest of the world has copied for online sales.

It is not a traditional festival and it is not a public holiday. It is on this hub because it is a Chinese celebration that the calendar cannot date by the moon, and because the French guide already kept a fiche for it. The date is Gregorian and does not move.