Except for the one-year-old in firecrackers,
The spring breeze warms Tu Su.
Thousands of families have a bright future.
Always trade new peaches for old ones.
What do "new peach" and "old symbol" mean? In modern terms, it is the Spring Festival couplets. Spring Festival couplets are a kind of couplets. How did China Spring Festival couplets develop?
As a unique literary form, Spring Festival couplets have a long history in China. It began in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, especially in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and has developed for more than a thousand years.
As early as before the Qin and Han Dynasties, during Chinese New Year, there was the custom of hanging Fu Tao around the gate. Fu Tao is two big boards made of mahogany with the names of the legendary gods "Shen Tu (Tu)" and "Lei Yu" written on them to exorcise ghosts and suppress evil souls. This custom lasted for more than 1000 years. It was not until the Five Dynasties that people began to replace the names of gods with couplets on mahogany boards.
After the Song Dynasty, it was quite common for people to hang Spring Festival couplets in the New Year. Therefore, Wang Anshi's poem "January 1st" wrote that "thousands of households always exchange new peaches for old ones" was a true portrayal of the grand occasion of the Spring Festival couplets at that time. Because the appearance of Spring Festival couplets is closely related to peach symbols, the ancients also called Spring Festival couplets "peach symbols".
Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of Ming Dynasty, strongly advocated couplets. After establishing the capital of Jinling (now Nanjing), he ordered ministers, officials and ordinary people to write a couplet and put it on the door before New Year's Eve. Dressed in casual clothes, he went door to door and enjoyed himself. At that time, the literati also regarded antithesis of couplets as an elegant enjoyment, and writing Spring Festival couplets became a temporary social fashion.
After entering the Qing Dynasty, couplets prevailed in Qianlong, Jiaqing and Daoguang generations, and many famous couplets appeared.
With the development of cultural exchanges between countries, couplets were introduced to Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Singapore and other countries, and the custom of pasting couplets is still maintained.