Spring couplets: which strip goes on the right, and why

A couplet is a matched pair of lines. The first line is called the upper couplet, the second the lower couplet, and Chinese prosody requires that the two end in opposite tone categories: the upper couplet ends on an oblique tone, the lower on a level tone. The reason is purely musical. A level ending sits flat and finishes the thought; an oblique ending tilts and leaves the ear waiting. You cannot end a couplet on a syllable that leaves the ear waiting, so that syllable has to be the first line.

Translated into the four tones of modern Mandarin, the working test is:

• Ends in third or fourth tone (dipping or falling): oblique, so this is the upper couplet, and it goes on the right.
• Ends in first or second tone (level or rising): level, so this is the lower couplet, and it goes on the left.

Say the two final characters out loud, one after the other. One of them will sound like a door left open. That one goes on the right.

The horizontal strip above the door, the hengpi, is four characters summarizing the pair below it, and it is the thing to look at before you pick up any glue, because it settles an argument the tone rule cannot.

A traditionally set crosspiece reads right to left, and the couplets below it follow: upper on the right. But a great many modern printed crosspieces are set left to right, like English, because that is how mainland China has printed horizontal text since the middle of the twentieth century. When the crosspiece runs left to right, the couplets should run with it, and the upper couplet goes on the left. Hanging a right-to-left pair under a left-to-right crosspiece is the actual, common, visible mistake, and it is the one a Chinese visitor will notice from the street.

How do you tell which way a crosspiece runs, when both directions use the same four characters? By reading it. Four characters that make sense in one direction and gibberish in the other tell you immediately. If you cannot read it, our calligraphy generator will render any four characters in a real brush font, in order, so you can compare.

Before the paper there was wood. Households hung two boards of peach wood on either side of the door, painted with the two spirits who tied up malevolent ghosts and fed them to a tiger, and the boards did the job the red paper does now: they kept things out. Those spirits have their own page, because they later got replaced by two Tang generals and became the door gods.

The changeover is visible in the poem every Chinese schoolchild memorizes. Wang Anshi, writing in the eleventh century, ends his four lines on New Year's Day with a thousand households in the early light "swapping the new peach boards for the old": boards, still, not paper, and the annual replacing of them already a fixed image.

The couplet itself, as a written pair of lines rather than a painted pair of spirits, is usually dated to 964 and credited to Meng Chang, the last ruler of Later Shu, who is said to have had a line brushed on each board: the new year receives the abundance left over; the fine festival is named Everlasting Spring. The detail worth knowing is where that couplet is filed. The Complete Tang Poems does not put it among the poetry. It puts it in book 875, among the portents and prophecies, and the reason is bleak, and both halves of it are in the Song record. Shu fell within months, and the official the Song emperor appointed to govern Chengdu was named Lü Yuqing, whose given name is the same "abundance left over" as the first line. The emperor had already made his own birthday a national festival and called it Changchun, Everlasting Spring, the same two characters that close the second line. The first spring couplet in Chinese history is filed in the anthologies as an accident of prophecy rather than as a piece of writing.

By the Qing the peach board had become the red strip outright. Fucha Dunchong's account of the Beijing year, published in 1906, opens its couplet entry by saying so flatly: the spring couplet is the peach board. He then describes the trade around it, which is the part people forget: from the twelfth lunar month onward, literate men set up under the eaves of the market shops and wrote couplets to order for a fee, and after the kitchen god had been seen off the finished strips went up door by door until the whole city was new.

And one detail that upends the thing everyone knows about couplets. They are red because red is protective, inherited from the boards. But not all of them were. Dunchong records that the imperial household and the imperial clansmen used white paper, bordered in red and blue, and that anyone not of the clan was forbidden to use it. For two and a half centuries the most powerful doors in Beijing were the only ones in the city without red couplets on them.

1. Read the crosspiece and note which way it runs. That decides everything else.
2. Find the last character of each vertical strip. Vertical text runs top to bottom, so it is the bottom one.
3. Say both endings aloud. Dipping or falling means upper couplet. Level or rising means lower couplet. If both come out level, the tone test is exhausted; use the sense, and put the half that sets the scene first.
4. Hang the upper couplet on the side the crosspiece starts from. Traditional crosspiece, right to left: upper couplet on the right as you face the door. Modern crosspiece, left to right: upper couplet on the left.
5. Put them on the frame, not the door leaves. The leaves are the door gods' territory, and on a two-leaf gate they swing apart and cut a strip in half.

On timing, custom is looser than the internet suggests. The old Beijing pattern had them going up gradually after the kitchen god's send-off on the twenty-third of the twelfth month, not all at once on New Year's Eve, and they stay up until they fade or until the following year replaces them. Taking them down early is the only thing widely considered unlucky.

The one thing that does not belong on the frame is the blessing character hung on its head. That is a separate object with a separate joke, and it goes on the door, the wall, or a cupboard, never in place of a couplet. Its page explains why it is upside down.