The red envelope: who gives it, how much goes in, and where lucky money came from

Start with why the question has no answer. The envelope is sealed. It is bad manners to open it in front of the giver, and in Hong Kong the old rule was not to open any of them until the seventh day of the year. The whole design of the custom is that nobody compares amounts in the room, which is what lets an aunt on a pension and an uncle who runs a factory both hand an envelope to the same child without anyone losing face. A fixed rate would break that. So there is none, and any page that gives you one is guessing.

What there is instead is a set of rules about the figure, and they are the same from Harbin to Singapore.

• Even, not odd. Odd sums are for funerals. The one exception is nine, which sounds like the word for "long-lasting" and is the biggest single digit, so it is welcome.
• Eights and sixes. Eight sounds like "prosper" in Cantonese, six like "smooth," so 66, 88, 168, 188, 288 and 888 are the amounts that come up again and again.
• Never a four. Four sounds like "death." No 40, no 400, no 444, and no amount with a four buried in the middle.
• New notes. Crisp bills, ideally straight from the bank, which is why the queues at Chinese banks in the last week of the lunar year are a national institution. In Malaysia a coin is often added to a child's envelope for extra luck.
• Notes, not coins, and folded in. The amount should not be guessable from the outside.

Inside those rules, the size scales with closeness, and the table below is the order, not a tariff. Read it as "more than the row below, less than the row above."

Two regional facts will save you from the commonest mistakes. In Hong Kong the sums are small and the count is large; a lai see is closer to a tip than to a present, and the same person may hand out dozens between the second day and the fifteenth. In mainland China the sums are the largest in the Chinese world and vary enormously from province to province, with the southeast coast famous for envelopes that would buy a phone and Guangdong famous for the opposite, so a figure that is generous in Guangzhou can look mean in Fuzhou. There is no way around asking someone local, and there is no shame in asking. Hong Kong even legislates the ceiling: under its anti-bribery law a civil servant may accept envelopes from close friends only up to a fixed total per year, and none at all from anyone they deal with at work.

The one rule everyone agrees on is direction: the envelope flows from the settled to the unsettled. What "settled" means splits the country in two. In the south, and in Hong Kong, Macau and the Cantonese diaspora, the line is marriage. A married couple gives; an unmarried person receives, at seven and at thirty-seven, which is why the New Year is the season when unmarried adults in Hong Kong are teased about collecting and married ones about paying. Cantonese even has a verb for going round asking, dau lai see, which is what children do to every married adult in reach. In the north the line is generation: elders give to those younger, and the custom is that you stop receiving somewhere around twenty-five, or thirty in the northeast, married or not.

A few other flows are fixed. Employers give staff an envelope for the first working day of the year, the "opening-work" packet, and it is the same for everyone in the office by design. Grown children who have started earning give envelopes upward to their parents, the moment the tradition marks as the real end of childhood. And in the cities of the Chinese south and southeast Asia, the people who keep your building running get one in the first days: the doorman, the cleaner, the helper, the waiter at the restaurant you eat at every week. A lion-dance troupe is paid in red envelopes, so is a temple, so is a doctor who has done you a favor, and so, by an old theatrical superstition, is any actor asked to play a corpse.

The etiquette of the handover is short. Give with both hands, receive with both hands, say the greeting (the page on New Year greetings has the right one for the right person), and put the envelope away unopened. Children used to kowtow for it; a bow, or in a modern family a hug, does the job now.

The Mandarin word is plain description: hongbao, "red packet." The money inside, at New Year specifically, is yasui qian 压岁钱, "year-pressing money," and the "pressing" is the interesting part; hold that thought for the history below. In Cantonese the envelope is a lai see, which looks like a different word entirely and is in fact one of the oldest words on this page: it descends from lishi, a term for profitable trade that appears in a merchants' covenant in the Zuo Commentary two and a half thousand years ago, and which survives in the titles of the wealth god. Our page on Caishen follows that word from the covenant to the envelope. In the Hokkien of Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan it is an ang pow, and in the Philippines, where the custom spread far beyond Chinese families, the word wore down to ampaw.

The story you will be told, if you ask a Chinese grandmother, involves a demon. A small black creature called the Sui comes on New Year's Eve to touch sleeping children on the forehead and give them fevers; a couple in the south of China frightened it off by wrapping eight coins in red paper and leaving them by the pillow, the coins flashed, the demon fled, and the custom was born. "Pressing the Sui," ya sui, sounds exactly like "pressing the year," and there is your name. It is a good story. It is also a folk tale with no classical source, and the sound-alike is the whole of its evidence, so we will file it where it belongs and go to the texts.

The texts start with coins that were never spent. From the Han dynasty onward, Chinese mints and private casters made amulet coins, cash-shaped pieces with lucky words or zodiac animals on them in place of the reign title, which numismatists call yansheng coins, "coins that press down and overcome." They hung on belts, went into tombs, were tied to cradles. Money as a charm, in other words, is older than money as a New Year present, and the "pressing" in the modern name is very likely this pressing: the weight of a coin holding bad luck down.

The name itself first surfaces in print in the least charming place imaginable. A Qing-dynasty collection of biographies, describing how corrupt officials in the last years of the Yuan dynasty squeezed the people, lists the polite names they gave their bribes by festival: "lantern money" at the Lantern Festival, "dumpling money" at the Dragon Boat, "mooncake money" at Mid-Autumn, and, on New Year's Eve, yasui qian, "year-pressing money." The first lucky money on record was a shakedown.

The custom as we know it is fully described only in the Qing. The Yanjing Suishiji, the almanac of Beijing customs published in 1906, gives it two sentences, and they are worth giving in full because they describe something that no longer exists: coins threaded on colored string, braided into the shape of a dragon and placed at the foot of the bed, and this, it says, is called year-pressing money; what elders give to children, it adds, is called year-pressing money too. So on the eve of a Qing New Year the lucky money was a small dragon of copper cash coiled by the bedpost, a charm first and a gift second. The envelope arrived when the string could not: with the Republic came paper money and coins with no hole in the middle, and the hundred coins on a red cord became a hundred coins wrapped in red paper, then a banknote in a printed red packet. The dragon at the bedpost lived on, shrunk to a coin under a pillow in Suzhou.

On 17 January 2014, two weeks before the New Year, WeChat added a button that sent a red envelope. It did two things the paper one could not. It let you send a packet to a group chat with the sum split at random among whoever tapped first, which turned a courtesy into a game, and it required a bank card, which turned a chat app into a payment system. The following year Tencent bought a slot in the CCTV New Year's Gala, the most watched broadcast on earth, and told the audience to shake their phones for envelopes; by Wikipedia's account of the figures the shaking peaked at 810 million shakes a minute. Alibaba answered with its own giveaway and its own Gala slot the year after, a contest the Chinese press named the red envelope war. By the New Year of 2016, WeChat users sent some 32 billion virtual envelopes over the holiday.

The paper packet has not gone anywhere. It is still what a child gets from a grandparent, still what the doorman gets, still what goes into the wedding ledger. The digital one took over the long tail: the friend in another city, the group of old classmates, the customer a shop wants to keep. Even Venmo, in 2022, added a "gift-wrapping" animation for sent money and admitted the red envelope emoji was the reason. The custom has now been copied by a company in San Jose, which is about as far from a Qing bedpost as a string of coins can travel.

The same envelope does a different job at a wedding, and the job is arithmetic. A Chinese wedding banquet is expensive, the guests know what a table costs, and the envelope you hand over at the sign-in desk is understood on all sides as covering your seat, plus something for the couple. Closer friends and family give more; a colleague gives roughly the seat. The family keeps a book. The ledger of who gave what is a real document, kept for years, and it is consulted when the giver's own family has a wedding, because the amount you gave is the amount you can expect back. The Book of Rites put the principle in four characters twenty-two centuries ago: courtesy values reciprocity, and to receive without returning, it says, is no courtesy at all.

The number rules carry over, with one twist. Fours are still out and eights still favored, but in some regions an odd amount is preferred at a wedding precisely because it cannot be divided in two, which is the last thing you wish on a marriage. The envelope itself should be a wedding one, printed with the doubled character for joy, which has a page of its own here, rather than a New Year design. Hand it over when you arrive, not at the table, and never bring a red envelope to a household in mourning; a white one is the envelope for a funeral, with an odd sum inside, and the two are not interchangeable in either direction.

The custom crossed every border the Chinese calendar did. Vietnamese children get li xi at Tet, the same word as lai see, with the same New Year greetings. Japanese children get otoshidama, but in a white envelope with the child's name written on it, the same white that a Japanese wedding gift comes in. Korean children get theirs in an embroidered pouch, no envelope at all. Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar took the red packet from their Chinese communities. And in Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Indonesia the envelope changed religion: Malay families hand out green packets at the end of Ramadan, green being the color of Islam, and Hindu families in Singapore and Malaysia hand out purple ones at Deepavali. If you are reading this in Kuala Lumpur you may get three colors of envelope in a single year, from three different neighbors, and be expected to know the rules for each.