Spring Couplets

Spring Couplets

Each Chinese New Year, families in China decorate their front doors with poetic couplets of calligraphy written with fragrant India ink and expressing the feeling of life's renewal and the return of spring.

It is said that spring couplets originated from "peach wood charms," door gods painted on wood charms in earlier times. During the Five Dynasties period, Meng Chang inscribed an inspired couplet on a peach slat, beginning a custom which gradually evolved into today's popular custom of pasting up spring couplets.

In addition to pasting couplets on both sides and above the main door, it is also common to hang calligraphic writing of the Chinese characters for "spring" and "wealth." Some people will even invert these drawings since the Chinese for "inverted" is a homonym in Chinese for "arrive," thus signifying that spring and wealth have arrived.





Actually,I'd been come back to my hometown this year earlier than before. So I pasted some spring couplets in front of our doors personally. I discovered that I have no idea how to paste them. I mean which couplet should be pasted in the left door or right door. I remember one of my Chinese teacher taught us how to tell it,but I simply forgot. So my younger brother and I simply pasted it without thinking which way is correct depending on the calligraphy which are written by someone probably.