Posted 2016/12/6
By tradition the Chinese love to paste couplets on their gateposts or door panels when celebrating Spring Festival. The couplets are generally written on red paper and the sentences contain auspicious meanings. In the region south of the Yangtze River, couplets are inscribed on yellow paper during funerals.
The Spring Festival couplets originated in the peach wood charms against evil (hung on the gate on New Year's Eve) in ancient China. Legend has it that the names of two celestial beings who were conquerors of demons and goblins are written down on pieces of peach wood to be hung on the gate to protect a family from evil and disaster and greet the coming of an auspicious year.
Later, people simply drew the images of these two celestial beings on their doors. Looking ferocious with glaring eyes and sharp weapons, they were enough to scare demons of all descriptions from intruding. Even today, pictures of the two gods can still be seen in ancient buildings. Later, people simplified the ritual by writing couplets on the peach wood to give expression to their best wishes.
In the beginning putting Spring Festival Couplets on the doors was a privilege for aristocratic families by which to sing praise of their ancestors' meritorious deeds and show off their wealth. Later they became popular among commoners. By the Song Dynasty the couplets had become part of local life.
It is no easy job to compose a good couplet because it requires symmetry in every field: sentence for sentence, noun for noun, verb for verb, and statistics for statistics. And it should sound poetic and reflect the actual situation of a family.
Today, Spring Festival couplets have acquired a new meaning—they have become a folk form to eulogize social development and people's better life.
