"On the 24th day of the Lunar New Year, every family writes Spring Festival couplets." The Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon in the 2024 Lunar Calendar is just around the corner, and families are ushering in the festive days of writing Spring Festival couplets. Writing Spring Festival couplets is an important custom during the Spring Festival to create a festive atmosphere and pray for good fortune in the form of writing couplets. As one of the first intangible cultural heritages in China, the custom of writing Spring Festival couplets can be traced back to the Spring Festival of 964 A.D., when Meng Chang wrote the first known Spring Festival couplet: "Enjoying the legacy of our ancestors in the New Year, the festive season heralds a constant springtime." This is a spring couplet with a propitious meaning and is considered to be the originator of spring couplets.
At the end of 2023, the 78th United Nations General Assembly, through consultations, unanimously agreed to adopt a resolution establishing Chinese New Year (Lunar New Year) as a United Nations holiday. The custom of writing and posting Spring Festival couplets has gone beyond the country's borders, becoming one of the most widely participated and largest folkloric activities in the world. More and more creators are keeping up with the theme of the times and the pace of society, bringing us well-conceived, emotionally sincere Spring Festival couplets full of literary and artistic charm.
The traditional Spring Festival couplets are mainly in five-character and seven-character phrases, some of which depict the spring scenery, shape and feelings, and express beautiful symbolism, such as "Bright sun, gentle east wind, spring makes people feel harmonious and comfortable. Flowers are fragrant, birds are chirping, and creatures are waking up and coming back to life."; some of which use the lunar calendar of the year of the Heavenly Stems and Earthly Branches to send a good vision, such as "The spring tide carries a message of joy, the Year of the Tiger arrives with good news."; some express their ideals, pray for good fortune, express good wishes, such as "Time is passing, and God has added another year to people's lives; spring is here, and happiness will come to one's family with it."; some pray for national peace and prosperity, career development, such as "The people of the country are happy, and everything is accomplished smoothly". The characteristics of the Spring Festival couplets are characterized by the use of the words of the couplets, through the expression of the art of calligraphy, highlighting the word "spring" and the word "joy", to express people's good wishes for the new year.
Spring Festival couplets should contain the seasonal atmosphere of spring, wishes of good meaning, distinctive regional style and personal characteristics. Traditional Spring Festival couplets mainly depict the spring and holiday blessings, and symbolize people's aspirations for a better life, which have been handed down for thousands of years and have been flourishing since then. Unlike traditional spring couplets, spring couplets in modern society are colorful and diverse.
The types of Spring Festival couplets include unit couplets, such as the couplets posted in the institutions, enterprises and institutions, schools and communities; attractions couplets, such as plaza gates parks couplets; and media couplets, a variety of paper media news media text and video couplets, and so on. Of course, the most important is the home couplets, which have the largest number, the most extensive content, and the most characteristics. Home couplets are mostly in five words and seven words, showing the principles of a family, highlighting the color of joyful and auspicious blessings and well-being. In short, the Spring Festival couplets should have the seasonal characteristics of spring, good wishes, as well as distinctive regional flavor and personal characteristics.
Society is developing and the times are progressing. The Spring Festival couplets also keep pace with society and the times, and with new contents and forms, they give people enlightenment of thought, resonance of feelings and aesthetic enjoyment, and have become an important point in realizing city prosperity and rural revitalization, as well as an effective carrier for promoting and spreading the Chinese excellent traditional culture.
The conception and writing of Spring Festival couplets requires to be relevant to people, events, scenes and feelings. Spring Festival couplets are positive in intent, giving people thought and spiritual inspiration. The content of the Spring Festival couplets should contain the characteristics and style of the times, such as the national major celebrations and important activities, the special imagery and symbols of the times, cultural publicity for foreign relations. As the clock strikes 2022, the three hero astronauts gave their motherland the best wishes of prosperity and peace in the faraway outer space. The couplet written by Zhai Zhigang "Flying and dreaming together to welcome the new age, striving and working hard to welcome the New Year together." is honored to be "the first outer space couplet".
The Spring Festival couplets show the new achievements of the new China, new results, highlighting the new weather in China. 2021 is the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the first year to implement the "14th Five-Year Plan", the opening year of striving towards the second centenary goal, the Spring Festival couplets, "Beidou navigation leads the way, the 14th Five-Year Plan is unique; South Lake builds the dream, the Bicentennial Plan is ambitious." (He Qinxue), "The centennial of the founding of the Party, the country has prospered in all walks of life; happiness has been ushered in every household, and people have been working harder and harder." (Qin Zhicang), all expressed people's ardently love towards their country and the expectation towards the future.
New Year Couplets depict Chinese people's new lives, new aspirations, new ambitions in the new era. The 2024 New Year couplets "The dragon is coiled on the Chinese knot, and happiness descends in the spring of well-being" (Chen Yongbo), "The dragon travels ten million miles, the spring breeze brings the first plums" (Jiang Dongyong), expressed the joyful feeling of the people and inspired the fighting will towards a new life.
The Spring Festival couplets promote rural revitalization, eulogize the beauty of industrial prosperity, natural ecology, civilization and simplicity, sharing and harmony in the countryside. The 2024 Dragon Year New Spring Festival couplets "Swallow dances in the springs, spring paints pictures of the rural villages; dragon writes a hundred blessings, blessings come to the people's homes" (Wu Zhiliang) and "Spring welcomes the children, the countryside paths are full of affection; blessings hang on the wood gate, the lobby of the house is cramming with laughter" (Song Xiaoke), depicting the new outlook of the countryside and people’s happiness from different sides.
The Spring Festival couplets depict the beautiful scenery of spring and the majestic mountains and rivers, and highlight the places of interest and the new atmosphere of cities and villages all over China. 2024 Jiachen New Year, China's city walls collected couplets from all over the world, Xi'an Hanguang Gate couplet "Spring brings auspiciousness, through a string of camel bells to send the blessing of news; the dream began in Chang'an, through a thousand years of time to shorten nostalgia" (Lou Yuchai), and Tongfeimen (South Gate) Couplet of Shouxian County in Anhui Province, "The flowing water brings dreams, setting off to fly to faraway places, and the beauty of Chu has never disappeared; Moss floats on the River Fei, the flat land is fertile and vast, and the tide of spring is flowing in a volatile way" (Zhou Spring), depict vivid and imaginative scenery and carry the nostalgia of children in faraway places.
Spring Festival couplets show the spirit of Chinese people to forge ahead and build careers in the new era. The couplet "The wind blows from the mountains and the sea, kunpeng rocks up, and sees the white clouds and the haze of the south again; the dream blossoms with the waves, the carp jumps joyfully, and sees the waves of the east and the scenery of spring again." mainly described the beautiful scenery of Dapeng Bay in Shenzhen, and condensed the love of the Nan State and the expectation of the prosperity and development of our motherland.
Spring Festival couplets have always been innovative and advancing with the times, people use a variety of artistic techniques to increase the artistic charm of the Spring Festival couplets, giving people aesthetic enjoyment.
Spring Festival couplets highlight the characteristics of the times in terms of lexicography. In addition to the use of poetic parallelism, neologisms, scientific terms, foreign words, etc. can also be included in the couplet. The 2023 New Year couplet "Affection is transmitted through express delivery, and family photos can be taken on TikTok; nostalgia is transmitted back to the hometown, and WeChat can be used for New Year's Eve." (Li Xiaojie) puts some new daily words that have become popular in the society into the couplet, and writes about the characteristics of the times and people's new life. The couplet "Ten thousand volumes of articles, inviting spring as a preface; a hundred years of rejuvenation, let the dream blossom." (Wang Zhi) uses anthropomorphic techniques to write out the people's yearning for spring and the pursuit of dreams. In the Spring Festival couplet "Rabbit dancing in the palace showing Chinese Style, Dragon flying over the Walls bringing the Spring of Well-Being" (Chen Huiping), "Chinese Style", also pronounced as "China Styler", is a new word with Chinese flavor and ethnicity. There are also the use of some leading words, lining words, function words, counting words with more than two syllables, as well as the conversion of word classes, etc., which also increase the artistic expression of the Spring Festival couplets.
Spring Festival couplets have increased literary character in syntax. The syntactic structure of spring couplets is diverse and varied, widely absorbing the forms of various literary styles, such as poetic parallelism and fugue, and breaking through the barrier of using poems as the main form. Many of these rhetorical methods have enriched the artistic techniques and forms of expression of the Spring Festival couplets. The literary rhetoric of prose, word splitting, topicality, questioning, anthropomorphism, and the use of allusions also broaden the thinking of Spring Festival couplet creation and provide new innovative ideas. For example, "New era, new journey, who will start as fast as a rabbit; big goal, big change, I will plow like an ox in the spring." (Qi Wanfeng), in which the words "who" and "I", in the form of self-questioning and self-answering, fully express the entrepreneurial pride of the masters of socialism in the new era. In the sentence arrangement, most of the Spring Festival couplets are mainly in five or seven words, but in some important occasions, there are also a combination of short and long forms, which is to adapt to the needs of different architectural places, to express a richer ideological content, and to innovate a variety of forms of artistic expression. Some Spring Festival couplets also have variations on the form of the sentence, we can not regarded them as the contrary to the rhyme, but should regarded as breakthrough and innovation, are also reasonable.
In terms of sound and rhyme, both old and new sounds of flat and oblique sounds can be used. That is to say, both ancient Chinese Pingshui sound rhyme (ancient sound) and modern Chinese Mandarin sound rhyme (new sound) can be used, but the two should not be mixed, so as to adapt to the needs of different regions and different groups of people. For example, in the collection of the "Hundred Best Spring Couplets" for the year of 2021, "Fourteen Five-Year planning, riveting energy; thousands of beautiful sights, occupying all the colors of spring." (Weiguo), in which "fourteen", "planning", and "riveting", the ancient pronunciation are read as oblique, and the new pronunciation are read as plain, which are in line with the rhyme of the couplet.
Everything starts with a new beginning. The Spring Festival of the Year of the Dragon is coming soon, let's write the scenic of the spring with our brushes, create better and more beautiful Spring Festival couplets, and unite the love and wishes for the motherland with distinctive and prominent themes, positive content, and elegant but majestic mood.