Chapter 83 The origin of Spring Festival couplets

Spring couplets originated from peach charms.Peach charms are rectangular peach wood boards, six inches long and three inches wide, hanging on both sides of the gate during the New Year. The two gods "Shentu" and "Yulei" are written on the peach wood boards to ward off evil spirits.The custom of hanging peach charms has existed since the Zhou Dynasty. During the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, in the court of Later Shu, the scholar Xin Yin wrote auspicious words on Taofu to celebrate the new year, but the Shu Lord Meng Chang he wrote was not satisfied, thinking that it was not literary enough.Therefore, Meng Chang himself wrote the two sentences "New Year Na Yuqing, Jiajie Changchun".This is our country's first couplet.

Until the Song Dynasty, Spring Festival couplets were still called "Peach Fu".Wang Anshi's famous poem "Thousands of households always exchange new peaches for old talismans" refers to this kind of peach talisman.It was also from the Song Dynasty that peach charms were changed from peach wood boards to paper, called "spring stickers". Chen Yunzhan of the Ming Dynasty recorded a story in "Zanyunlou Miscellaneous Words": Zhu Yuanzhang of the Ming Dynasty established his capital in Jinling. One year before New Year's Eve, he suddenly delivered an edict on a whim: a Spring Festival couplet should be added to the door of the house of the ministers and concubines.On New Year's Eve, Zhu Yuanzhang went out of the city in micro-clothes to watch and laugh.Suddenly, I saw nothing at the door of a family, so I went to inquire, and found out that it was a barrow family. I couldn't read, and I hadn't had time to ask someone to write it for me.Zhu Yuanzhang was happy for a while, so he took up a pen and wrote the Spring Festival couplet that "split the road of life and death with both hands, and cut the root of right and wrong with one knife".Lianyi is appropriate, humorous, and the tone is extraordinary.Proposed by Emperor Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, posting Spring Festival couplets has become a custom since then, and has been passed down to this day.So it was not until the Ming Dynasty that "Couple" was really popular among the people.Nowadays, some TV dramas about the Tang and Song dynasties, whether they are pavilions or pavilions, hang one or two couplets at every turn, which seems to have a sense of history, but it is actually a big joke.