Little New Year: the Kitchen God's send-off and the week before Chinese New Year

Chinese schoolchildren learn the rhyme; it is printed in the national first-grade textbook. It starts with the Laba porridge of the eighth day of the month and then gives each of the last days of the year its own job. Here it is dated for the 2027 New Year.

On the 23rd or the 24th of the twelfth month of the Chinese lunar calendar, which lands between mid-January and mid-February, six to eight days before New Year's Day. Because the lunar month moves against the Western calendar, the date changes every year. These are the next three, worked out from the same calendar engine as our Chinese calendar converter:

Which of the two days a family keeps depends on where the family comes from more than where it lives now. The folklorist Wang Juan, asked about the split by China News Service, put it plainly: north on the 23rd and south on the 24th in general, but people move, so it is not absolute. A Shanghai household with a grandmother from Shandong may well keep the 23rd.

The answer you will be given is a saying: guan san min si chuan wu, "officials the third, commoners the fourth, boat people the fifth." The court and the officials saw the god off on the 23rd, ordinary families on the 24th, and the people who lived on boats on the 25th. Because the Qing emperors kept the 23rd in Beijing, the story goes, the north copied them, and the south, far from the court, kept the commoners' day. China News Service reports this as the common explanation, and Wang Juan broadly accepts it.

The old texts can test the second half. In 1147 Meng Yuanlao wrote down, from memory, the customs of Kaifeng before it fell to the Jin, and Kaifeng is about as northern as a Chinese capital has been. His date is the 24th, which the people of Kaifeng called "crossing the year." Wu Zimu's record of Hangzhou, the southern capital, also says the 24th. The poet Fan Chengda, in the 1180s, calls the 24th "old tradition." Then, in 1906, Fucha Dunchong's Annual Customs of Beijing puts the sacrifice on the 23rd, and adds, "commonly called the little New Year." That is the first text we have found to use the name.

So the 24th was once kept north and south alike, and the 23rd is a later date that took hold around Beijing. That fits the Qing-court story, though nobody has yet shown us the court document that made the change, and the accounts that name an emperor disagree about which one. What the texts do settle is that the southern date is not a deviation. It is the original.

The god who leaves on Little New Year is Zao Jun, the Lord of the Stove, whose paper portrait has watched the family's kitchen all year and who is now going up to tell the Jade Emperor what he saw. Everything done for him is a way of improving the report. Our page on Zao Jun, the Kitchen God follows him back two and a half thousand years; here is what the day itself looked like.

In Beijing in 1906 the offering was cheap and sticky: southern sugar, the long white sticks of Guandong sugar, sugar cakes, and a dish of clean water with beans and straw, which, Fucha Dunchong explains, were for the god's horse. Then the portrait was peeled off the wall and burned with paper money, the smoke carrying him up, and the firecrackers were, in his words, "extremely many" that day. A new portrait went up on the eve to welcome him home. Lao She, a generation later, gave the reason for the sugar as every Beijing child knew it: with his mouth stuck shut, he cannot tell the Jade Emperor anything bad.

The Song version was wetter. In Kaifeng, Meng Yuanlao says, families invited monks or Daoist priests to chant, set out wine and fruit, and smeared wine lees on the door of the stove, which they called zui siming, "getting the Director of Fates drunk." A god who leaves drunk forgets the details. In Hangzhou, Wu Zimu records, rich and poor alike offered vegetables, malt sugar and beans, and the street sellers cried their "teeth-gluing sugar" all day, a name that says exactly what it was for.

It was men's work. The same Beijing book records the proverb "men do not bow to the moon, women do not sacrifice to the stove": the Mid-Autumn moon was for the women, the stove for the men. That is a curious rule for the god of the room where, in most households, the women did the cooking.

The rhyme gives the 24th to cleaning, and the cleaning has a name, sao chen, sweeping the dust. It is a full spring clean done in winter: the walls brushed down, the windows washed, the bedding aired, the corners that are ignored the rest of the year turned out. The meaning is not hard to read. The old year's grime and the old year's bad luck go out together, and the house is empty and ready for the new.

There is a practical deadline too. On New Year's Day sweeping is forbidden, because you would sweep out the luck that has just arrived, and in many homes the broom stays in the cupboard until the fifth day. Our page on Chinese New Year taboos has the story behind that rule. So the whole house has to be done in the week between Little New Year and the eve, which is why the clean is the second line of the rhyme and not the last.

The Song cities added a stranger custom on the same night. In both Kaifeng and Hangzhou, families lit lamps under the beds, which they called zhao xuhao, "lighting out the wasters": the small spirits that make household things go missing were driven out of the last dark corners along with the dust.

Whatever the god is offered, the family eats. In the north that means tanggua, sugar melons, small ribbed balls of malt sugar, some dusted with sesame, and the pale, brittle sticks of Guandong sugar, which are hard when cold and set like glue once they warm in the mouth. They are the original teeth-gluing sugar, and they still behave like it. Northern families often make dumplings for supper. In parts of the south the dish is niangao, sticky rice cake, because its name sounds like "higher every year," and the bowls for visitors fill up with sesame candy and peanut brittle.

Then the rhyme takes over the kitchen. Tofu on the 25th, meat on the 26th, a cockerel on the 27th, dough set to rise on the 28th, buns steamed on the 29th. Several of those carry a wish. Two are near-puns, fu in tofu for fu, fortune, and ji, chicken, for ji, luck; the tones differ, and nobody making the New Year food has ever minded. The third is not a pun at all: fa, the word for dough rising, is the same word as the fa of facai, to prosper. The cooking is front-loaded for a reason: on the first days of the year the knives are put away, and what is eaten is what was made in this week.

After the god has gone, the house goes into a kind of controlled emergency. In old Beijing the spring couplets went up "gradually after the sacrifice to the stove," door by door, until the whole lane was red; our page on New Year decorations has what goes where and when. The markets fill, the travel rush starts, and everyone who has been putting off the year's loose ends finds that they now have about seven days.

The god's niche over the stove stays empty all week. That is part of the point. With the inspector away, the family is briefly unobserved, and the last days of the year belong to them. He comes back on the eve, when the new portrait goes up, and the sixteen days of the New Year begin.

Vietnam keeps the same day on the 23rd of the twelfth month as the festival of Ông Công Ông Táo, and it has its own shape. There are three kitchen deities rather than one, and after the offering and the burning of paper goods, families release live carp into ponds, lakes and rivers. The carp stands for perseverance, Voice of Vietnam explains, after the legend of the fish that leaps the falls and becomes a dragon, the same story that gives China its dragon gate. Like Little New Year in China, the day marks the start of the run-up to Tết.