Chinese New Year decorations: what each one means, where it goes, and when it comes down

Hang them in a matched pair, one either side of the gate, porch or front door, where a visitor sees them before anything else; a string of smaller ones can go indoors. That is the whole of the rule, and it is the rule for the round red lantern with a gold tassel that fills every shop in January.

That lantern is younger than it looks. Lanterns at the New Year are old: the Yanjing Suishiji, the almanac of Beijing customs published in 1906, has lantern markets and lamps lit from the thirteenth to the seventeenth, and on one night lamps carried from the inner rooms all the way to the gate, which it explains as a way of driving out bad luck. But those lanterns were hexagonal, painted, glass-sided, every shape a lantern-maker could think of. The fat round red one was designed in 1949. For the founding ceremony of the People's Republic, the old hexagonal palace lanterns on Tiananmen were judged too small and too battered, two designers, Zhang Ding and Zhong Ling, drew eight big red round ones, and a workshop outside Qianmen made them. The design was copied so widely that within a generation it had become the Chinese lantern, and now it hangs in Chinatowns that were founded a century before it existed.

Why red? Because red is the color of luck, and of keeping bad things away, which is the thread running through everything on this page. The lanterns stay up through the first fortnight and traditionally come down after the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth, the night the New Year ends and the one night when the lantern, rather than the door, is the point.

The square of red paper with one black character on it is fu 福, good fortune, and you are supposed to hang it upside down. Turned on its head, the character is fu dao le, "fortune is upside down," which sounds exactly like "fortune has arrived." Paste it as a diamond, standing on one corner, anywhere you would like fortune to arrive. The joke only works out loud, which is the point: a visitor is meant to say "your fu is upside down," and you are meant to agree that yes, it has arrived.

Folklorists add one rule of placement. The fu on the front door welcomes fortune in, so it goes up the right way round; the upside-down fu belongs indoors, on the water vat, the cupboard and the rubbish bin. The reason is that dao also means "to pour out," and nobody wants their fortune poured out at the gate. On a bin or a bucket the pun works the other way: tip it out and the character turns upright, and the bad luck is what gets poured away. Plenty of families paste the door fu upside down anyway, and the Beijing folklorist Wang Zuoji caused a minor storm online in 2018 by calling it a mistake.

It is a folk pun, not a classical rule, and it is worth knowing that before someone tells you its origin. You may hear that a Ming empress ordered it, or that a servant of the Empress Dowager Cixi pasted one upside down by mistake and talked his way out of a beating with the pun, or that it began in a Qing prince's mansion in Beijing. All three are legends; none of the old almanacs of New Year customs mentions the upside-down fu at all. The character itself has a page of its own here, and if you want to write your own on red paper, our calligraphy generator will show it in a proper brush hand.

The front door is where the New Year is really kept, and it has been dressed the same way for a very long time. The Jingchu Suishiji, a calendar of customs from the sixth century, has households pasting a painted rooster on the door, fixing boards of peach wood beside it, and painting two gods, one on the left and one on the right, to stand guard. Five hundred years later the Song capital's markets were printing door gods and peach boards and selling them by the stack in the last month, and on New Year's Eve, a Southern Song account of Hangzhou says, every household great or small swept its gate, changed its door gods, nailed up its peach charms and pasted up its spring placards.

Spring couplets are those peach charms, grown up. The Beijing almanac says so in its first words on them: couplets are peach charms. By its day they were written on red paper by scholars who set up tables under the eaves of shops in the last month to earn a little brush money, and pasted after the offering to the kitchen god. There was one exception, and it is a good one: the palace and the imperial clan used white paper, edged in red or blue, and nobody else was allowed to. The two lines go either side of the frame and a crosspiece over the lintel, and which line goes on which side is a real rule with a real exception, set out on our page on spring couplets.

Door gods go on the door leaves themselves, one on each, facing each other so that they look at whoever approaches. They are armored men with weapons, and which two men they are is a matter of fierce and cheerful disagreement: the sixth-century pair were the gods Shentu and Yulü, the popular modern pair are two Tang generals, and the Beijing almanac's author, with a shrug you can hear across a century, says both identifications are wrong and one should just call them door gods. Our page on the door gods sorts out who is who.

Hanging paper strips are the row of little red banners, each about a foot long and cut through with lucky phrases, that flutter along the lintel in northern China. The Beijing almanac calls them guaqian and gives them a class distinction: ordinary households hung them, great families rarely did, shops used small yellow ones three inches long, and the ones printed with the Eight Immortals were for hanging in front of a Buddha, not a door.

Window paper-cuts, chuanghua, "window flowers," are red paper cut into lace and stuck to the glass, where the light comes through them. The motifs are visual puns: a fish for surplus year after year, a peach for long life, the zodiac animal of the coming year, a pair of birds on a plum branch. Chinese paper-cutting was inscribed on UNESCO's list of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2009, and it is the one decoration on this page that people still commonly make at home rather than buy; a sheet folded four times and a pair of small scissors will get you a passable snowflake-style fish in ten minutes. Our paper-cutting page has two free templates to start with.

New Year pictures, nianhua, are the bright woodblock prints of fat babies clutching carp, gods of wealth and gods of long life that go up on inside walls. In old Beijing, the almanac says, matting stalls went up in the busy streets every twelfth month to sell them, and women and children fought to buy them. Three of the great print workshops, Yangliuqing near Tianjin, Taohuawu in Suzhou and Zhuxianzhen in Henan, were put on China's national heritage list in 2006.

The red knots hanging from doors and lanterns have an older ancestor than their name. The Southern Song account of Hangzhou describes knots tied from thread of five colors, one shaped as four golden fish in a "same heart" knot, another called the "everything lucky" knot, given as New Year presents and hung over the door to keep evil influences out. The name "Chinese knot" is much newer: it was coined in Taiwan in 1980 by the craftswoman Chen Hsia-sheng and the editors of Echo magazine, who set out to record the old knotting before it disappeared. Each knot has a name that is itself a wish, and our page on the Chinese knot goes through them; the knots on your door belong to the same family of lucky objects as our Chinese good luck charms.

In the south the New Year is decorated with living things. The word for kumquat, in Cantonese, is pronounced the same as the word for luck, so a kumquat tree heavy with fruit by the front door is luck, in quantity, ripening. Mandarin oranges do the same work in gold. Peach blossom is for romance and for a year that opens out, and plum blossom, which flowers in the cold, for endurance. Guangzhou's New Year flower market, where half the city walks the flower streets in the last days of the year to buy them, was put on China's national heritage list in 2021, and the listing itself glosses the kumquat as great luck and the peach blossom as romance.

The north did this too, indoors. The Beijing almanac has hothouse peonies in full color and kumquats hanging yellow at the New Year, exchanged as gifts until the whole room was fragrant. A pair of mandarins is still the standard thing to carry to a New Year visit, and our page of Chinese New Year gifts explains why two and never four. A pot of kumquats on the table and a branch of blossom in a tall vase are the two decorations on this page that need watering, and the only two you can eat or smell.

Ask why the New Year is red and you will almost certainly be told about the Nian, a beast that came out of the sea or the mountains every New Year's Eve to eat livestock and children, until the villagers discovered it was afraid of the color red, of fire and of loud noises, and hung red paper on their doors and set off firecrackers to drive it away. It is a wonderful story. It also first appears in print in 1933, in a Shanghai newspaper column whose author admitted he could not trace it, and it only reached its full form, red couplets and all, in the 1950s. Our page on the Nian tells how a newspaper monster became the most famous thing about the New Year.

The older record is less dramatic and more interesting. The sixth-century calendar has families setting off firecrackers at cock-crow on New Year's Day to scare away a mountain demon, and pasting peach wood and door gods on the door for the same purpose. Peach wood was the charm; its commentary calls peach the essence of the five elements, able to subdue a hundred monsters. Over the centuries the peach boards became red paper, and red, already the color of weddings and good fortune, became the color of the charm itself. White and black stay off the door: white is the color of mourning, and a household in mourning traditionally pastes no red couplets at all that year.

Up: after the house has been swept, in the last week of the year. Old Beijing pasted its couplets after the offering to the kitchen god on the twenty-third of the twelfth month (southern households made the offering on the twenty-fourth), which next falls on January 30, 2027; the Cantonese saying puts the cleaning on the twenty-eighth, "wash away the grime," and the decorating after it. Everything should be up by the eve, February 5, 2027. Nothing goes up on New Year's Day, when you do not sweep, cut or throw away anything, including the offcuts.

Down: there is no single rule, and anyone who gives you one is speaking for their own family. The old texts give a pattern rather than a date. The first displays of the New Year came down after the fifth day; the lamps and altars lasted until the Lantern Festival, which next falls on February 20, 2027; and the couplets and door gods were not taken down at all. They stayed up, fading, until the next year's were pasted over them. That is exactly what Wang Anshi's New Year poem, the one every Chinese child learns, describes in its last line: every household swapping the new peach charm for the old. So: lanterns, flowers and indoor pieces after the fifteenth; the things on the door whenever the weather takes them, or next New Year.