Chinese paper cutting: what the window flowers mean, and how to cut one

A New Year paper-cut is a sentence you read with your ears. Chinese is full of words that sound alike, and folk art has been using the fact for centuries: draw the thing whose name sounds like the wish, and you have written the wish without a single character. So a fish on the window is not about fish. It is about yu, the word for surplus, the hope that there will be something left over when this year ends. Put a lotus beside it and the lotus, lian, adds "year after year."

The peach belongs to the gods rather than the dictionary: it is the fruit of long life, the one grown in the orchard of the Queen Mother of the West. The zodiac animal is simply the calendar; every window in a village changes animal when the year does. And the red is not a choice. Red is the New Year color, the color that drives off the Nian beast in the 20th-century story, and a window flower in any other color would look like a mistake.

The one character almost everyone has seen cut in red paper is the double joy of a wedding, two copies of the word for joy side by side. That is its own story, told on the page for the double happiness symbol.

On the windows, first of all. In the old northern farmhouse the window was often a wooden lattice covered with paper, and a red cut-out pasted on it glowed like stained glass when the lamp was lit inside or the sun came up outside. On modern glass the effect is the same, and it is why a window flower is designed to be looked at against the light, all holes and threads.

Over the door, a row of long red paper strips cut with lucky phrases hangs along the lintel above the couplets, fluttering in the wind. On the ceiling, in parts of the north, a big round flower goes up in the middle of the room. On gifts, a small red cut-out laid on a box of cakes or a bag of oranges turns a present into a New Year present; what goes in the box, and what never should, is on our page of New Year gifts. The full set of what goes on a Chinese door and window at the New Year, and when it comes down, is on our page of New Year decorations.

UNESCO's description of the craft, written when it was inscribed on the list of the intangible heritage of humanity in 2009, sorts the uses into three: decorating the home (windows, beds and ceilings), marking festivals (weddings, birthdays and ceremonies), and prayer, "invoking the rain, warding off the devil." The first two are easy to believe. The third is where the history gets interesting, and we will come back to it.

Here is the secret the finished window flower hides. Fold a square of paper in half and in half again, and you have four layers meeting at one corner. Anything you cut through that folded wedge appears four times when you open it, and every other copy is flipped like a reflection, because that layer was folded over. Fold once more, corner to corner, and each cut appears eight times. Three small shapes become twenty-four, and the result looks far more skilled than the person holding the scissors.

The two templates below are drawn for exactly those folds. Each is a single A4 page: the folding steps, the folded wedge printed at full size with the areas to cut away shaded gray, and a picture of what you get. They are free, with no signup, for home or classroom use.

1. Use thin paper. Red origami paper or thin gift-wrap cuts cleanly through eight layers; printer paper fights back after four.
2. Fold toward the center. The corner that was the middle of the sheet is the corner marked CENTER on the template. Both straight edges of the wedge must be folds.
3. Cut the holes before the outline. The folded wedge is stiffest while it is still whole.
4. Never cut straight across a fold edge. Shapes may bite into a fold, which is how the diamonds and dots are made, but a cut running all the way across it separates the pieces.
5. Unfold slowly, press it flat under a book for a minute, and stick it to the glass with a few dots of glue stick or removable tape.

More free sheets, including Chinese character practice pages, are on our printables page.

Paper needs a dry grave to survive fifteen centuries, and it found one in the Astana cemetery outside Turfan, on the edge of the desert in Xinjiang. Among the things excavated there are the oldest paper-cuts known anywhere, dated to the Northern Dynasties, the fifth and sixth centuries, and now in the Xinjiang Museum in Ürümqi.

The best known, from tomb 303, is a round flower of yellowish paper: an eight-pointed flower at the center, two rings of diamonds, a border of triangles. The China Writers Association's account of it notes the detail that matters here: it was cut in one go from a folded sheet. Its neighbors from the same cemetery are rosettes of paired horses, six pairs standing back to back, and of monkeys, sixteen of them in eight pairs around a flower, along with butterflies, chrysanthemums and cut human figures. Put the eight-fold template above beside a photograph of the tomb 303 flower and you are looking at the same idea, fifteen hundred years apart.

The written record starts at the New Year, and it starts with a surprise: the first New Year cut-outs in the books are not paper.

The Jingchu Suishiji, a sixth-century record of the festivals of the middle Yangtze, describes the seventh day of the first month, Humans' Day, the people's own birthday in the New Year's count of creatures. People made a soup of seven vegetables, climbed somewhere high to write poems, and made little human figures, cut from colored silk or from gold foil, which they pasted on their screens or wore in their hair. The book's commentary quotes the older writer Dong Xun on what the figures meant: people entering the new year, their appearance changed to new. Three centuries later the poet Li Shangyin, writing a poem for the same day, could already treat the custom as ancient, crediting the gold ornaments to the old customs of Jing and the cut-silk figures to the Jin dynasty. The seventh day is still marked; our Chinese New Year page dates it for the coming year.

The first clear line about cut paper is Du Fu's. In a poem looking back on his flight from the An Lushan rebellion, written in the 750s, he remembers arriving soaked and starving at a friend's house after dark. The friend lit the lamps, brought "warm water to wash my feet," and "cut paper to call back my soul," which most readers take as paper cut for the old rite of calling back the spirit of someone who has had a terrible fright. It is a small line in a long poem, and it tells you that by the Tang, cut paper was not only pretty. It did things.

So when did paper cutting begin? The honest answer is that nobody knows. Paper was in use centuries before the Turfan flowers, cutting silk and foil is at least as old, and most paper-cuts ever made were stuck to a window for a season and thrown away. What survives is a desert cemetery, a festival book and a line of Du Fu. That is enough to say it is very old. It is not enough for a date, whatever a museum label or a tourist leaflet may claim.

Du Fu's friend was not unusual. Paper-cuts have always had jobs, and UNESCO's "invoking the rain" has a charming opposite in old Beijing. The Yanjing Suishiji, the 1906 almanac of the city's customs, records that in the sixth month, the season of heavy summer rain, whenever the wet weather would not stop, the girls of the house cut a figure out of paper and hung it on the left side of the gate. She was called the saoqing niang, the girl who sweeps the sky clear, and her name was her whole job description.

The window flower is the gentle end of the same idea. A fish on the glass at New Year is a wish, and a wish pasted where the whole street can read it is halfway to a charm.

Mostly women. UNESCO's description of the craft says it is practiced mainly by women and passed from mother to daughter over many years, starting in childhood, and that the motifs change with the region, with fine and delicate designs the rule in the south. It is a household art before it is a gallery one, learned at a kitchen table the way the templates above are meant to be used.

The most famous of them was a farm woman. Ku Shulan, from Xunyi County in Shaanxi, born in 1920, cut crowded, brilliantly colored paper pictures of a figure she called the Paper-Cut Goddess, and came to be known by that name herself. In 1996, when she was 76, UNESCO named her a master of folk art. Her work still tours museums in China, and has traveled to Japan.