Chinese Symbol for Happiness (福): Meaning, Luck, and Origin

福 runs to thirteen strokes, written left to right, and it splits cleanly in two. The left half is 礻, the altar radical: a compressed drawing of an altar table, and the standard signal that a character has one foot in the temple. The right half is 畐 (also read fú), a tidy stack of three parts: a short horizontal 一, a small square 口, and the field grid 田. Generations of Chinese teachers have sold that stack as "one mouth and a field," which is to say: everyone fed, with land to feed them. Treat that as the memory trick it is rather than real etymology (the older story below is better), but it works. Draw an altar, a mouth, and a field, and you have written fú. One practical warning for anyone writing it by hand or pricing it as a tattoo: the altar radical takes exactly one dot. Add a second and you have written 衤, the clothing radical, which produces 褔, a rare and entirely different character. The difference between blessed and dressed is one dot.

Here is the honest small print: fú is not quite the feeling of being happy. Chinese keeps separate shelves for this. The feeling of joy is lè; delight attached to an occasion, good news or a wedding or a baby, is xǐ (喜). The modern everyday word for happiness, the one in dictionaries and pop lyrics, is xìngfú, and you will notice it ends in the same fú. Fú itself is the condition underneath all of those: blessedness, protection, luck, the general state of things going your way. This is also why the character does double duty. If you arrived here hunting for the Chinese symbol for luck, you can stop hunting; fú covers blessing and luck in one, and a Chinese reader would not think to split them. The English habit of calling it "happiness" owes a lot to the three porcelain star gods on restaurant shelves the world over, Fu, Lu, and Shou, conventionally translated "Happiness, Prosperity, and Longevity." The first of the trio is our character, and the label stuck. And here is a small consolation for anyone who feels "happiness" is a sloppy fit: English used to agree with the Chinese. The "hap" buried inside happy is an old word for luck, the same one hiding in perhaps, mishap, and hapless, so a happy person was originally just a fortunate one. When the great Victorian translators reached for happiness to render fú, English still carried that older sense of good luck, and the match was tighter than it now looks. Then the English word drifted toward pure mood and left the luck behind. Fú never did. One relative deserves a namecheck before we go on. Xǐ doubled into a single character is 囍, "double happiness," the red emblem of Chinese weddings. It is a separate symbol with a separate story, and it gets its own page.

The right way up is upside down

Walk down any street in China in the weeks around Lunar New Year and 福 is everywhere: gold on red, printed on diamond-shaped paper squares, pasted to doors, windows, elevator lobbies, and the occasional car hood. A remarkable number hang upside down, and every one of those is upside down on purpose. In Mandarin, "the fu is inverted" (fú dào le) sounds exactly like "the fu has arrived." Hang the character wrong way up, and any literate passerby will involuntarily announce that fortune has arrived at your house. It is a pun that installs itself on the front door, and hundreds of millions of households renew it every winter.

The national scavenger hunt

Since 2016 the payment app Alipay has run a Lunar New Year game called Ji Wufu, "collect the five fortunes": point your phone camera at any 福 out in the world, on a door, a poster, a friend's screen, and the app deals you digital fortune cards. Assemble all five kinds and, on New Year's Eve, you split a cash pot with everyone else who managed it. China Daily has put cumulative participation near 900 million people across the game's first decade. For two weeks every winter, one of the larger rituals on the planet consists of people photographing doorways.

Luck, sold in small denominations

Everyday Mandarin breaks fú into charming small change. Kǒufú is "mouth-luck," the specific good fortune of being present when something delicious appears. Yǎnfú is "eye-luck," a feast for the eyes; ěrfú, "ear-luck," covers catching a great song. When something works out thanks to another person, the graceful reply is tuō nín de fú, "by your luck": I was riding on your good fortune. English speakers brush against this constantly without noticing, because the TOEFL exam's official Chinese name, tuōfú (托福), borrows the sound of the English initials while spelling out "entrusted to fortune." Millions of students a year, quite literally, sit the luck.

A name that wishes you well

As a name element, fú is a plain, warm wish for a lucky life, and it has been bestowed on children, shops, and dogs with equal enthusiasm. Especially dogs: Láifú, "fortune arrives," is the classic Chinese dog name, the local Lucky. When Beijing hosted the 2008 Olympics, its five mascots were the Fuwa, the "fortune dolls," which put the character on lunchboxes on every continent. Curious what your own name would look like built the Chinese way, from sound plus a well-omened meaning?

Build a Chinese name from the sound of your own name and a well-omened meaning.

The Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, compiled around the year 100, files 福 under the altar radical and defines it in a single word: blessing, literally the aid the spirits send down. Its formula for the character reads "from the altar 示, with 畐 as the sound." The sound half, though, was carrying more than sound. On the oracle bones of three thousand years ago, where the earliest forms survive, 畐 is a drawing of a wine jar, full-bellied and narrow-necked, and early forms of 福 set the jar beside the altar, in some versions lifted toward it by a pair of hands. The oldest picture of good fortune in the Chinese record, in other words, is a person pouring wine out for the spirits, in the hope that heaven pours something back. That original bargain never really left the character. Blessing, in the fú sense, is not something you feel; it is something granted, sent down on a household from somewhere above, which goes some way to explaining why the character lives on doorways rather than in diaries. The oracle-bone and bronze forms are collected in Richard Sears' Chinese Etymology database, if you would like to see the jar for yourself.

The five blessings

When Chinese literature first sat down to define the good life, it made a list. In the "Great Plan" chapter of the Book of Documents, among the oldest of the classics, the good life is counted out as the five blessings, the wǔfú. In James Legge's translation: "The first is long life; the second, riches; the third, soundness of body and serenity of mind; the fourth, the love of virtue; and the fifth, fulfilling to the end the will (of Heaven)." Notice what happiness is on this list: not a feeling anywhere in sight, but a completed life, long, solvent, healthy, decent, and finished properly. That is the freight one small character was built to carry. The greeting wǔ fú lín mén, "may the five blessings arrive at your door," still goes up on doorframes every New Year, roughly three thousand years after the list was drawn.

Why there are bats on everything

Once you know fú, Chinese art starts confessing a secret: the bats. Vases, silk robes, carved screens, and window lattices flutter with bats, an animal the West files under Halloween. The reason is a homophone. The word for bat, fú (蝠), sounds exactly like 福, so a bat painted on a bowl is a blessing on the wing, and five bats arranged around a longevity symbol spell out the five blessings themselves, a design that turns up on everything from imperial robes to teacups. Chinese decorative art runs on puns of this kind, and the bat is the hardest-working pun in the catalog.

The old man who lost his horse

The definitive Chinese story about luck sits in the Huainanzi, a compendium assembled at a princely court in the second century BCE. An old man near the northern frontier loses his horse; it wanders off into nomad country. The neighbors come to commiserate, and the old man only asks how anyone can know this is not a blessing. Months later the horse returns leading a string of fine steppe horses, the neighbors come to congratulate, and he asks how anyone can know this is not a disaster. His son takes up riding the new horses, falls, and shatters his thigh. Commiseration again; the same shrug again. Then the nomads invade, every able-bodied man on the frontier is drafted, and, the text records, nine in ten of them die. The lame son is passed over, and father and son both survive. The proverb the story left behind, sài wēng shī mǎ, "the frontier old man lost his horse," is what a Chinese friend will say, consolingly, when your flight gets canceled. Too soon to tell.

Fortune leans on misfortune

Laozi compressed the same philosophy into twelve characters. Chapter 58 of the Dao De Jing, in Legge's rendering: "Misery! - happiness is to be found by its side! Happiness! - misery lurks beneath it!" Fortune and misfortune, fú and huò, run through the classics as a rotating pair, each quietly growing inside the other. Which explains something about the doorway custom: a culture that trusted luck to sit still would not feel the need to re-paste the invitation every single year.

The emperor's handwriting

The Kangxi Emperor ruled for sixty-one years and, as the Prince Kung's Palace Museum notes, hardly ever left inscriptions, which makes the one big 福 in his handwriting a celebrity in its own right. Carved onto a stele some eight meters long and set into an artificial grotto in the garden of Prince Gong's Mansion in Beijing, it is billed as the "Number One fu under Heaven," and the museum will happily point out the trick in the brushwork: worked into its strokes a reader can find the characters for sons, talent, fields, and long life. One character, written so that it quietly contains the entire wish list. Visitors line up to touch it. Three centuries on, the stroke of one emperor's brush is still handing out luck, one palm at a time.