Chinese New Year couplets: what they say, how they are built, and how to hang them

Walk down any street in a Chinese neighbourhood in the week before the new year and the doors turn red: a strip of red paper down each side of the frame, a shorter one across the top, often a square 福 turned on its corner in the middle. These are Spring Festival couplets (春联, chūnlián), and they are the most widely practised piece of Chinese poetry there is. Every one of them follows rules that are a thousand years old, and once you know the rules you can read a door the way a Chinese neighbour does: which line comes first, what the family is hoping for, and whether the couplet was bought at the market or written for the house.

Where they come from

The custom descends from peach-wood charms (桃符) hung on door posts to keep harm out, which by the tenth century carried written lines. The earliest couplet whose text survives is credited to Meng Chang, the last ruler of Later Shu, for the new year of 964: 新年纳余庆，嘉节号长春, "the new year takes in the blessings left over; the fine season is named Long Spring". Paper replaced wood, red replaced the natural colour (red being the colour that frightened the year-beast 年 in the legend, and the colour of luck ever since), and by the Ming dynasty the emperor was ordering every household in Nanjing to put a pair up. The form has not changed since: two lines that match, a banner that sums them up.

The rules that make two lines a couplet

A couplet is not just two lines of good wishes. The lines have to answer each other, and Chinese readers can hear when they do not.

Same length. Usually seven characters a line, sometimes five, occasionally nine or eleven. Both lines must match exactly.

Word for word correspondence (对仗). The character in each position of the second line answers the one in the same position of the first: a noun faces a noun, a verb a verb, a number a number, a colour a colour. In 天增岁月人增寿 / 春满乾坤福满门, "heaven" faces "spring", "adds" faces "fills", "years" faces "the world", "people" faces "blessing". The same character is never used in the same position in both lines.

Tones (平仄). Mandarin has four tones. The first and second are "level" (平), the third and fourth "oblique" (仄). A couplet's first line ends on an oblique tone and its second on a level one, so that read aloud the pair closes on a rising, open note. This is also how you tell the lines apart on someone else's door: the line whose last character falls is the first line.

The banner (横批). Four characters across the top that sum up the pair: 四季平安, "peace in all four seasons"; 万象更新, "all things made new". It should not repeat a character from the lines.

Fresh imagery. The market couplets lean on a small stock of phrases (财源广进, "wealth flows in"; 生意兴隆, "business booms"), and nobody minds. A couplet written for a particular house does better with its own images: the family's trade, the view from the door, the animal of the year. 2027 is the Year of the Goat, and 三羊开泰, "three goats open the year", puns on the old phrase 三阳开泰, the three suns of the returning light.

A hidden name (藏头). Poets have long hidden a name or a message in the first character of each line. For a couplet written for one person, the two characters of their given name become the first character of each line, which is why having a real Chinese name matters: a transliteration gives you nothing to hide.

Ten classic couplets, translated

How to hang them

Stand facing the door. The first line goes on the right, the second on the left, and the banner above the door reads right to left, the direction Chinese was written for two thousand years. If a shop has printed the banner left to right (common now), the lines swap to match: whichever side the banner starts from is where the first line hangs. Our sheets keep the traditional order and say so on the guide page.

Couplets go up on New Year's Eve, or in the last days before it, with paste or tape at the top and bottom. They stay up all year; replacing them is part of the next new year's cleaning. Chinese New Year 2027 is 6 February, so the eve is 5 February.

The 福, and why it is sometimes upside down

福 (fú) means blessing or good fortune. It goes on the door as a square turned on its corner, and you will see it both ways up. The upside-down version is a pun: 福倒了 ("the 福 is upside down") sounds exactly like 福到了 ("fortune has arrived"). Families hang it that way on a cupboard, a window or the fridge, where it is a joke everyone gets. On the front door most people keep it upright, on the reasoning that fortune should come in and stay, not pour out; some regions disagree, and nobody will tell you off either way.

Writing one for yourself

If you have a Chinese name, the two characters of your given name can open the two lines. Our couplet writer drafts within the rules above, checks the length, the hidden name and the tones, has a second model judge the parallelism, and falls back to a classic couplet when the draft does not pass; it tells you which you got. The sheets come as print files at real size and in A4 pieces, with the lines explained in English and the hanging diagram on the first page.

Questions

Which line is the first line?

The one whose last character carries a third or fourth tone (falling or dipping). It hangs on the right as you face the door. If you cannot read tones, look at the banner: the first line hangs on the side the banner starts from.

Do couplets have to rhyme?

No. They match in structure and tone pattern, not in rhyme; the last characters of the two lines are different tones by design.

Can I write a couplet in English?

You can write two parallel lines in any language, and people do, but the tone rule and the one-character-per-position matching are what make the form; an English version is a different thing. For a bilingual door, hang the Chinese couplet and put the translation on a card inside.

What paper and ink?

Red paper, black or gold ink. A print shop will print on red card; at home, print on white and mount on red, or print the sheets as they are: the red is on the file.

Names and characters in this guide follow the rules we use when proposing names: common simplified characters, a surname from the Hundred Family Surnames, no awkward homophones.