People are Buying Spring Festival Couplets in Market
The Spring Festival couplets are a very special and unique literary form of Chinese culture. It started during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period (907 AD-960 AD) and became very prosperous during the Ming (1368-1644 AD) and Qing (1644 AD-1911 AD) Dynasties. It is still a very pouplar way for Chinese people to cerebrate the Chinese Spring Festival.
Earlier in the Qin (221 BC-206 BC) and Han Dynasties (206 BC-220 AD), Chinese people kept a tradition of putting peach wood tablets on both sides their gates. On each of the tablets people wrote the names of two gods who they believed could word off the ghosts, known as “Shen Tu and Yu Lei”. This kind of tradition lasted for over a thousand years until the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period when people started to write couplets with auspicious meanings on the peach wood tablets. It was said that the first Spring Festival Couplets were written by Meng Chang, the King of the Su Kingdom in
Writing Spring Festival Couplets is also a form of Art of Traditional Culture
964 AD. He wrote the Spring Festival Couplets on the peach tablets and hanged them outside of his bedroom in the palace. Then gradually people adopted this custom of writing couplets during the Spring Festival and hanging them outside of their gates.
During the Ming Dynasty (1368AD-1644AD), the tradition of pasting the Spring Festival Couplets was most popular. One year, before the Chinese New Year arrived, the first Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang made an order that every family had to write the Spring Festival Couplets on red paper to cerebrate the New Year. Using the red paper because the peach wood is red, it signified luck and auspicion. In the temples though, yellow paper is used and also families that had people just pass away, using white, green and yellow colored paper. During the first year they use white, second year they use green and the third year families use yellow. From the fourth year onward, these families use red. Using different colors in 3 years is a sign of respect for those that have passed.
Today, Chinese people still use red paper to write the Spring Festival Couplets to hope to have luck, auspicion and also have the new wishes for the next year!!
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