Diary of New Year Customs: Posting Spring Festival Couplets

Narrator: Wang Jie, Professor of the Philosophy Department of the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Posting Spring Festival couplets during the Spring Festival is also an important custom for us Chinese people. Although many of us live in cities today and have moved into buildings, when the Spring Festival comes, people will still go to shopping malls and supermarkets to buy a Spring Festival couplet they like and paste it on their doorstep. If someone in the family has good calligraphy, they will also personally Start writing a Spring Festival couplet that you like.

Spring couplets are also called \”door pairs\”, \”spring posts\”, \”couples\”, \”couples\”, etc. They depict the background of the times and express good wishes with neat, dual, concise and exquisite words. , is a unique form of literary expression in China. Therefore, posting Spring Festival couplets can be said to be a major event during the Spring Festival. Posting Spring Festival couplets, like posting New Year pictures, also evolved from posting door gods.

The history of Spring Festival couplets

As early as the Warring States Period more than 2,000 years ago, ordinary people would hang peach stems made of peach wood next to New Year pictures at the door of their houses to ward off evil spirits. It is the prototype of Spring Festival couplets. According to \”Huainanzi\” records, peach charms, also known as peach stems, are carved from peach wood. On them are engraved incantations that can ward off evil spirits and reduce them. They are changed once a year.

The Taofu at that time was not the Spring Festival couplets that people remember today, so the official birth of the name Spring Festival couplets can be traced back to the Ming Dynasty. After Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, established his capital in Jinling, he issued a decree on New Year\’s Eve that every home of ministers and common people must write a couplet. Since then, the Spring Festival couplets have been promoted across the country and have been used to this day.

The particularities of pasting Spring Festival couplets

In our folk customs, the process of pasting Spring Festival couplets is also very particular. If the Spring Festival couplets are pasted Not good, or even posted wrongly, not only will it make people laughIf so, it will also affect your good luck for the year. In fact, there is a trick to distinguish the upper and lower couplets. The key lies in the last word. According to the metrical regulations of the Spring Festival couplets, the last word of the first couplet must end with a oblique tone, which is the three tones and four tones in Mandarin. Then the second line is in flat tone, which is the first and second tones in Mandarin. That is what people often say.

When pasting Spring Festival couplets, the top couplet should be pasted on the right and the bottom couplet on the left. Then the left and right are distinguished by facing the gate or arm pillar. The reason why they are posted in this way is because the straight writing is from right to left, so the Spring Festival couplets are also read from right to left.

We talked about \”sweeping the house on the 24th\” before. There is also a folk proverb that says: 24th, write big characters, which means that you can write Spring Festival couplets after the 23rd of the twelfth lunar month, but when What about pasting Spring Festival couplets? The best time to post new Spring Festival couplets is from the afternoon to the evening of New Year\’s Eve. The order during this period should be from the outside to the inside, first the head blessing, then the door blessing, and finally the blessing, which means blessings for the year. They all flow from the outside to the inside, tearing up the old Spring Festival couplets means getting rid of bad luck, and pasting new ones means getting rid of the old and ushering in the new.

Every time when it’s time to post Spring Festival couplets, the elders start to make paste and move ladders, while the children hold the Spring Festival couplets and follow beside the adults, rushing ahead, tearing off the old Spring Festival couplets and waiting for the adults to paste them. After applying the paste evenly, the Spring Festival couplets in my hand on the ground looked like a brand new picture. The bright red Spring Festival couplets were posted on the doors and windows, and the atmosphere of the New Year suddenly became stronger, which means that the new year is prosperous and everything is renewed. Posting Spring Festival couplets not only adds to the festive atmosphere of the festival, but also expresses people\’s longing for the beautiful things. The earnest hope for a happy life. Moreover, from the Spring Festival couplets with different styles and rich content, we can feel the breadth and depth of Chinese traditional culture, as well as the unique family motto and family tradition of every household, which is an indispensable custom for us Chinese to celebrate the New Year.

Production: Li Fangzhou Zhang Yuexin

Source: Guangming.com