The origin of Spring Festival couplets can be traced back to the ancient custom of peach wood charms used to ward off evil spirits.
Spring Festival couplets are parallel auspicious phrases pasted on both sides of the door during the Spring Festival, often accompanied by a horizontal scroll, used to express good wishes for bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new. Their prototype is the peach wood charm that ancient people hung beside the door, that is, peach wood boards inscribed with words to ward off evil, originally intended to pray for the peace of the household.
It is said that the custom of hanging peach wood charms has a long history. Ancient people believed that peach wood could ward off evil, so they hung or replaced peach wood charms at the time of bidding farewell to the old and welcoming the new. According to records, during the Five Dynasties period, the ruler of Later Shu once inscribed parallel auspicious phrases on a peach wood charm, which later generations regarded as an earlier prototype of Spring Festival couplets. By the Song Dynasty, the practice of writing couplet phrases for the New Year gradually became popular among the people. The description in Song poetry of always replacing old peach charms with new ones reflects exactly the scene at that time of changing peach wood charms to welcome the new year.
The name Spring Festival couplets is generally believed to have been established in the Ming Dynasty. It is said that the Ming Dynasty once encouraged every household to post couplet phrases at the New Year. After that, the practice of using red paper instead of peach wood boards to write auspicious phrases became increasingly widespread, and red paper Spring Festival couplets gradually became the main form still used today.
Traditional Spring Festival couplets emphasize neat parallelism and harmonious tonal patterns. The upper and lower couplets have an equal number of characters and matching parts of speech, and their content mostly revolves around themes such as harvest, reunion, peace and prosperity. When posting them, generally the upper couplet is on the right and the lower couplet is on the left, with the horizontal scroll in the center. They are mostly put up around New Year's Eve, and new couplets are replaced the following Spring Festival. Today, in addition to handwritten Spring Festival couplets, printed Spring Festival couplets are also very common. Writing and posting Spring Festival couplets still carries people's hopes for the new year.