Spring Festival: all you need to know about China’s most important new year festival (4)

住(zhu)-春联 (Spring Festival Couplets)

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As we mentioned earlier, Spring Festival represents a fresh new start. Traditionally, the 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 beautiful villa or a small village hut, the matriarch of the family will always take the lead in carrying 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 of filth and dust is properly disposed of, so that room will be made for good luck to come in.

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

Pasting couplets on doors is a tradition that originated during the Five Dynasties (907-960), and continues to be an enduring aspect of Chinese culture. 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.