Chinese New Year gifts: what to bring, what never to give, and why the number matters

The New Year gift is a visiting gift. You are not exchanging presents under a tree; you are arriving at someone's home on the first days of the year, next on February 6, 2027 and February 7, 2027, the second being the day married daughters go back to their parents, and you do not arrive empty-handed. What you carry is for the household, not for one person, which makes the choice easier than it looks.

• For a household you are visiting: mandarin oranges, the standard gift from Guangzhou to Kuala Lumpur, in a bag or a box, with their leaves on if you can find them. A tin of good tea, a bottle of wine or liquor, or a box of sweets or pastries in red packaging all work as well or alongside.
• For parents and elders: the best tea you can afford, or something for their health and comfort. Once you are earning, a red envelope of your own, given upward to your parents, is the traditional gift.
• For children: money in a red envelope, not a toy. The rules for the amount are on our page on red envelopes.
• For coworkers and the office: something to share, like a box of mandarins or sweets. In the office, money moves down the ladder at the New Year, from the boss to the staff, not up.

Whatever it is, bring it in a pair or an even number. "Good things come in pairs" is an old set phrase, used already in a novel of 1730 as a character's excuse for pouring a second cup, and at the New Year it is taken literally: two oranges, two bottles, a box of eight. And say something as you hand it over; our page of New Year greetings has the words.

The worst gift you can hand a Chinese friend is a clock, and the reason is two syllables. "To give a clock" is song zhong. So, with exactly the same sounds and the same tones, is song zhong in its other sense: to see a parent through their last days and into the grave, one of the most solemn duties a Chinese child has. A clock on the doorstep, in other words, announces that you have come for the funeral. A Taiwanese dictionary of Mandarin and Hokkien sets the two phrases side by side under the entry for the clock and draws the conclusion without comment: clocks and watches are, for that reason, customarily avoided as gifts.

The taboo runs strongest with the old, for whom a ticking clock also counts down the time left, and at the New Year, when every sound in the house is heard as an omen for the next twelve months. A wristwatch between young friends or a couple is usually forgiven. A carriage clock for a grandmother never is, however beautiful.

Pears are the one fruit you leave at the shop. The word for pear, li, is the word for parting, and to share a pear, fen li, sounds like "to separate." It is the pun couples take most seriously, and it has a remarkable pedigree. In the winter of 1167 Wang Chongyang, the founder of the Quanzhen school of Daoism, was trying to persuade a rich married couple in Shandong, Ma Danyang and his wife Sun Bu'er, to give up their household and follow him. According to the preface to the collection of his poems from that winter, he locked himself in a hermitage for a hundred days and every ten days sent them a pear, cut first into two pieces and at last into fifty, with a poem each time. The couple got the message. They separated, both became Daoist masters, and the book is called, with no subtlety at all, Ten Conversions by Dividing Pears. Nobody at a New Year table wants that message delivered.

Umbrellas are san, which sounds like san, to scatter or break up, as a family or a friendship might. The tones differ, and nobody cares. If it is pouring when your guest leaves, lend them one; just make it clear you want it back.

Shoes are xie, identical in sound to the word for evil, and they are also the thing you walk on, and the thing you walk away in. Parents buying shoes for their own children are the usual exception, and even then not usually as a New Year present.

Knives and scissors need no pun. The idiom for a clean break is "one slash, two pieces," and a blade given as a present is that idiom made of steel. The usual folk workaround, if a good kitchen knife really is the right gift, is for the recipient to hand you a coin, so the knife has been sold rather than given.

Count what you are giving before you wrap it. Four sounds like the word for death, in Mandarin and in Cantonese, which is why a set of four teacups or four oranges is a small disaster and why many Chinese buildings have no fourth floor; the full story of that avoidance is on our page on feng shui numbers and, in more detail than most people want, on the Chinese symbol for death.

Even numbers are the rule, because good things come in pairs and odd sums belong to funerals. Eight is the favorite, because it sounds like prospering, and six sounds like things going smoothly. The one welcome odd number is nine, which sounds like "long-lasting." These are the same rules that govern the money inside a red envelope, and for the same reasons: a gift at the New Year is read as a wish, and the number is part of the sentence.

If you bring nothing else, bring mandarins. In Cantonese the mandarin, gam, sounds like the word for gold, and the kumquat, gat, like the word for luck, as a Macau newspaper's round-up of Guangdong's New Year customs puts it, so a bag of them is gold and luck, in quantity, with leaves. Hokkien goes further: a Taiwanese dictionary notes that the short way of writing the orange swaps in the character for luck, on purpose, for luck's sake.

The etiquette is in the number and the exchange. Give an even number, two at the very least, eight if you want to add prosperity to the pun. In Teochew households, a Malaysian Chinese newspaper explains, the host takes some of the guest's oranges and puts some of their own in the bag before the guest leaves, so that both sides go home with luck; a New Year of visits becomes a slow circulation of the same fruit around a town. The oranges were given to children, too, before the red envelope took over.

The north had its own version. The Yanjing Suishiji, the almanac of Beijing customs published in 1906, describes hothouse flowers, peonies in full color and kumquats hanging yellow, given back and forth as New Year gifts until the whole room was fragrant. The potted kumquat tree by the front door is the same wish on a larger scale, and it is on our page of New Year decorations.

Wrap it in red or gold. White and black are the colors of mourning, and a gift in elegant white paper looks, to a Chinese eye, like a condolence. A red paper bag with the shop's gold printing on it is perfectly correct, and a plain box can be dressed with a small red paper-cut on the lid.

Use both hands. Hold the gift out with two hands and a small nod, the way a business card or a red envelope is given; one hand reads as offhand.

Expect a refusal, and offer again. A polite host will often say you should not have, and decline once or even twice before accepting. It is the courtesy of not appearing greedy, not a no. Insist warmly and it will be taken.

Do not expect it to be opened. Gifts, like envelopes, are usually put aside and opened after the guest has gone, so that nobody has to perform delight or compare what they were given in the room.

The New Year gift is much older than any of its taboos. Su Shi, the great poet of the Song dynasty, wrote three poems for his brother in the early 1060s while posted to the northwest and unable to go home for the year's end, and he explained the titles in a preface: in their home province of Shu, exchanging gifts at the end of the year was called kuisui, "presenting the year," inviting each other to eat and drink was "parting from the year," and staying up all night on the eve was "keeping the year." The poem on gifts describes each family giving what its own hills and rivers produce, rich and poor in proportion, the rich sending embroidered silk that lit up the room, the poor something ground in their own mortar, embarrassed that it was not more. It is still an accurate description of the reception hall of any Chinese family.

By Qing Beijing the visit itself was the ritual. On New Year's Day, the 1906 almanac says, once officials had paid their respects at court, they went round the city to their relatives and friends: the close ones were visited in person, up into the main hall, while for the distant ones it was enough to leave a card at the door. And the habit was strong enough that the People's Republic, three months old, issued a notice over Zhou Enlai's signature on December 31, 1949, forbidding government staff to host banquets, give or accept gifts, or pay each other New Year calls. The notice was two sentences long. The custom outlasted it.