It’s ‘Guanggun day’ in China and 1,111 lonely hearts are sitting bashfully across from each other in the vast banquet hall of a hotel here. 

The men – the true Guangun or single sticks, as bachelors are called in China – are on one side, while the women, known as Mingming or bright, are on the other. They are all single and the eleventh day of the eleventh month is their day. 

The number one plays out in almost every aspect of the day. The singles paid 111 yuan to attend the get together. It is hoped that a Guangun and a Mingming will meet and become a “guangming” which literally means light. 

Guanggun Day or single stick day originated in the 1990s. College students came up with Nov 11th with all it’s single digits to celebrate and perhaps wallow in the loneliest number. 

“At 11 minutes past 11 o’clock on Nov 11, we started banging washbasins and shouted,’ give me a chance to love you’, only god knows who we were sending the message to”, Zhang Xiaohao, 30, in recalling a Guanggun Day when he was a university student. 

Still single and still shouting, Zhang is now an engineer with a US-based software company. He says he works late almost every night and his “social circle is too limited, with few women around me.” 

Sociologist Wu Qinghua said even in big, crowded cities like Beijing and Shanghai people can feel isolated as human contact is increasingly restricted to people in business circle. 

But on the 11th day of the 11th month many of the singles at the Beijing party are neither bashful nor discouraged. 

“I have participated in this kind of party more than 30 times,” said Wang Bing, 39, who runs his own business and also a part-time Latin dancer with the National Chinese Opera and Dance Drama Company. 

“I haven’t found my love yet, maybe my standards are too high,” he said. 

“The hundreds of Mingming (single women) in the crowd neatly reflected the personality types found in the men. Some were shy, others were looking for a good time and a few were classic gold diggers. Psychologist Windy Chen says women face a lot of pressure to be married by the time they’re 30 and worry they’ll not find a partner if they leave it too late. “The fact is the more people worry about getting married the harder it is to find a suitable partner,” said Chen, “And a marriage of convenience can damage a person’s future.”