Chinese New Year: when it is, which animal, and how the sixteen days are kept

The last night of the year is the reunion dinner, the one meal a year that the whole country travels for, and then the long sit. The Dongjing Menghua Lu, a memoir of Kaifeng written in 1147 by a man who had lost the city and wanted to remember it, ends its year with the sentence everyone still quotes: “families sit round the stove until dawn, which they call guarding the year.” The same book records the market stalls in the last month printing and selling door gods, the demon-queller Zhong Kui and peach charms, which is to say that by the twelfth century the decorations were a printed commodity. The sixth-century book has the eve too, as a feast laid out for the departing year with rice deliberately left over, to be thrown into the street on the twelfth day of the new one “to send off the old and take in the new.” Lucky money is the eve’s other business, and the Beijing book describes it before the red envelope existed: coins threaded on colored string, braided into the shape of a dragon and laid at the foot of the bed.

Firecrackers first. The sixth-century book says they were set off in the courtyard at cock-crow to frighten off a one-legged mountain creature that gave people fevers, which is as good an origin for a noise as any, and the Beijing book has the whole city lighting incense and letting them off from just after midnight, “without pause, lane after lane.” Then the greetings, elders first, and the drink: the old rule was that the youngest drank before the oldest, because the young had gained a year and the old had lost one. Beijing ate dumplings, the same for rich and poor, with a coin or a tiny silver ingot hidden in one for whoever would have a lucky year. Wang Anshi’s poem on the day, the one every schoolchild learns, has the rest in four lines: firecrackers, the year ending, the warm wine, and every door swapping its old peach charm for a new one. The don’ts are a matter of not sweeping out what has just arrived: no cleaning, no throwing away, no sharp words, nothing broken.

The day a married daughter goes home. In a tradition where a bride joined her husband’s household, the second day was the one fixed visit back to her own parents, with her husband and children in tow and gifts in hand, and it still empties the roads of half the country. Beijing kept a second custom on it, according to the 1900 book: this was the capital’s day for offering to the god of wealth, “with a great many firecrackers, day and night without stopping,” three days earlier than the south.

Breaking the Five. The Beijing book states the rule and its expiry in one breath: “the fifth day is called Breaking the Five; within the five days no raw rice may be cooked and women may not go out,” and from the sixth the shops “gradually open for trade.” Everything that was forbidden on the first day is allowed again, the sweeping happens, and in the south the day belongs to the god of wealth, received at dawn with firecrackers by households competing to be first. The Caishen page has the scramble, and who exactly is being received.

Humans’ Day, and the oldest named day in the run after the first. The sixth-century book already has it: a soup of seven vegetables, figures of people cut from colored silk or gold foil and pasted on screens or worn in the hair, and a climb somewhere high to write poems. Its commentary explains the count. The first day of the year belongs to the chicken, the second to the dog, the third to the sheep, the fourth to the pig, the fifth to the ox, the sixth to the horse, and the seventh to people, each creature’s fortune for the year read off that day’s weather, and the Beijing book of 1900 repeats the list unchanged with grain added on the eighth. In Singapore and Malaysia the seventh is the day of the raw-fish salad, yusheng, tossed high at the table by everyone at once, a custom of the last century that has become the one most of our readers there would name first.

The Jade Emperor’s birthday, kept above all by the Hokkien, who in Fujian, Taiwan, Penang and Singapore treat it as the true New Year of the household and set a table to heaven before midnight with a pair of sugarcane stalks tied to the legs. The story they tell is of an ancestral village hiding from raiders in a cane field until the ninth and coming out to thank heaven. Elsewhere it is a quiet day, which is the general rule for the back half of the sixteen: the eighth had its 108 lamps in old Beijing, the thirteenth its lamps from the inner rooms to the gate, and the intervening days are for the calls you have not yet paid.

The first full moon of the year closes the festival. Lanterns are hung and walked under, riddles are pinned to them, and sweet glutinous rice balls are eaten for their roundness. It was the one night of the old imperial curfew that was lifted, which is why some scholars call it the real lovers’ night of the calendar. Its own page has the history from the sixth century to the Ming palace kitchens. After it, the decorations come down, the leftover rice goes out, and the year is simply the year.