For a country where many major holidays can be traced back thousands of years, Singles Day is a refreshingly recent invention. No one is quite sure exactly who first thought it up, but it definitely emerged as a student tradition in the mid-1990s. The most widely-accepted story is that it emerged from the dorms of Nanjing University in 1993 when four single male students got together to discuss how to break free of the loneliness and monotony of single life. One suggested that because of the ones in the date, November 11 would be a good day on which to organize activities for singles.

What started as an idea executed by a small group of friends gradually became a university tradition. Singles Day grew into something like the anti-Valentines day, a day China’s single young people – at first just men, but later single women adopted the tradition as well – could use as an excuse to get together and do fun stuff like visit karaoke bars together.

The fact that the holiday went from local to national in less than two decades likely has a lot to do with China’s demographics and its culture. The country has a serious gender gap – by 2020 it will have 35 million more men than it does women. And because there’s immense family pressure on many young Chinese men and women to find a suitable partner and marry young, young people of both genders embraced the holiday as a kind of release.

I say the holiday was about being with friends and having fun because, now, Singles Day is about shopping – mostly online shopping. How did an underground youth holiday go corporate? It’s a long story, but the short answer is Alibaba.

By the late 2000s, Singles Day was well known enough that most of China’s internet users – who skew young and urban – were familiar with it. There might have been some small shops online and offline offering sales on that day earlier, but no major company bought into the holiday until Alibaba launched its first Singles Day online sale in 2009.

In that first year, Alibaba was the only major ecommerce company to offer a sale, and it featured just 27 brands offering discounts via its Tmall marketplace. The sale was definitely successful, but it wasn’t enough to redefine the holiday on its own.

2010 changed things, though. Alibaba went bigger, offering more brands and deeper discounts. But other companies had noticed the potential of the 2009 sales bonanza and decided to follow suit. Ecommerce platforms like JD had their first major Singles Day sales in 2010, and overnight Singles Day went from a Tmall sale to something that was beginning to look like Cyber Monday in some western countries.2010年改變開(kāi)始了。

Over the next few years, Alibaba, JD, and other Chinese ecommerce players all expanded their one-day discounts, and sales grew exponentially. On Singles Day in 2012, for example, Alibaba’s marketplaces, Taobao and Tmall, did about US$3 billion in sales. In 2013 that number nearly doubled, and Chinese shoppers had obliterated America’s Cyber Monday spending records in just the first few hours of the sale. And it’s only getting bigger.

This year’s Singles Day online shopping bonanza is likely to break all the records set last year. If Alibaba can keep its pace, it may do more than US$10 billion in sales in 24 hours. That’s already pretty crazy, but the next step for Singles Day may be for it to set foot outside of the Middle Kingdom. World, meet Singles Day.

In an article about the company’s plans for Singles Day, Tmall CEO Wang Yulei wrote that Alibaba’s “core keyword” this year is globalization:

We want consumers to be able to buy products from all over the world, and Chinese people all across the world to be able to buy the products they need.