Year of the Rabbit: A look into 2023 (6)

Illustration: Kou Jie/People's Daily Online

2023: The auspicious Spring Festival couplets

As we mentioned earlier, the Spring Festival represents a fresh new start. Traditionally, home is the most important place for Chinese people, so keeping it clean and tidy is a crucial part of preparations for Spring Festival.

Whether it is a large villa or a small village dwelling, the matriarch of the family will always take the lead to carry out a thorough clean of the house before Spring Festival. Family members will also lend a hand with the chores, making sure that a year's worth of dust and dirt is properly disposed of, so that their homes will be well prepared for good luck to enter.

After the cleaning, every house is decorated with bright red Chinese knots, window paper-cuts, pictures with the character 福 （fu） in the center, as well as lanterns and couplets.

In ancient times, people hung short branches from a peach tree on doors to expel evil spirits. Later, the branches were replaced by wooden plates with Chinese characters on it, which then became a piece of red paper with a line of verse to welcome the New Year. Dueling couplets became a popular literary game with Chinese speakers, requiring verbal and intellectual dexterity, while the writer had to have advanced calligraphy skills to make the couplets more appealing.