Chinese New Year taboos: what not to do, and the story behind each rule

The rule everyone knows is the one with the oldest story. The Jingchu Suishiji, a sixth-century record of the year's customs on the middle Yangtze, notes that on New Year's Day people tied coins to the foot of a stick and threw it onto the rubbish heap, saying "make it as wished." Its commentary explains why. A merchant named Ou Ming, it says, was once given a servant girl called Ruyuan, "As You Wish," by the god of a lake, and from then on whatever he wanted he got, until he was rich. One New Year's morning she was slow to get up and he beat her with a stick. She burrowed into the rubbish heap, disappeared, and the household slowly grew poor. In the commentator's own day, he adds, people in the north still stood by the heap on New Year's night and had it beaten with a stick, which he supposes was done in memory of Ruyuan.

The heap, in other words, is where the luck lives, and on the first day of the year you leave it alone. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary still lists Ruyuan, among the word's senses, as the earliest name of the god of wealth, the god who is received on the fifth day. Hence the modern version: the whole house is cleaned before the eve, the brooms are put away, and nothing is swept or carried out on New Year's Day. Strict households keep it up to the fifth. If something really has to be swept, Taiwanese advice is to sweep from the door inward, so the dust stays in and the fortune with it.

When the rubbish finally goes out, it goes out on purpose, as "sending poverty away." The date depends on where you are. The same dictionary collects three: the third day in Suzhou, where Gu Lu's almanac of local customs has people leave the swept dust and an old broom at a fork in the road; the day before Humans' Day, the sixth, in a Song dynasty record, with seven pancakes laid on top of the pile; and the twenty-ninth of the month in another. Many households today do it on the fifth.

No hair washing on New Year's Day, because hair, fa, sounds like fa, to prosper, as in the New Year greeting gongxi facai. The tones are different and nobody minds: wash your hair on the first morning and you wash your fortune down the drain. The laundry waits too, for the first two days, which in the usual Taiwanese explanation are the water god's birthday. Some families extend the rule to bathing. The practical answer is the one everyone follows anyway: wash everything, yourself included, on the eve, and put on new clothes in the morning.

Over the New Year, anything said aloud is heard as a forecast. So nobody mentions death, illness, ghosts or being broke, and the number four, which sounds like the word for death, is dodged even in conversation; the full story of that avoidance is on our page on the Chinese symbol for death. Children are not scolded, because a child scolded on the first day will be scolded all year, and nobody is supposed to cry. What you should say instead is on our page of New Year greetings.

Breaking something is the classic accident, and it has a classic cure. Say suisui ping'an, "peace year after year," at once. Sui is the year, and sui, written with a different character, is "smashed to pieces," so the pun turns the broken bowl into a blessing. This is not a family improvisation: the Ministry of Education dictionary in Taiwan defines the phrase as exactly that, the lucky words spoken when pottery or glass breaks at the Spring Festival. Then sweep up the pieces quietly, and do not throw them out until the fifth.

Knives, scissors and needles stay in the drawer on New Year's Day: a blade cuts the year's luck, and blood is the worst omen of all. Taiwanese writers on the custom add a kinder reason, that it gave the women who had cooked for weeks one day off. It is the reason the eve's cooking is so enormous. Everything for the first day is chopped the day before.

Medicine and doctors are avoided on the first day, for fear of a year of medicine bottles, and some families avoid hospital visits for the whole holiday. Even the press that repeats the rule adds the caveat, and so do we: prescribed medicine is taken as usual, and anyone who is really ill sees a doctor.

Money does not leave the house on the first day: no lending, no borrowing, no asking for a debt to be repaid, since money that flows out now flows out all year. The other half of the rule comes earlier. Debts are settled before the eve, so that nobody carries one into the new year.

No rice porridge for breakfast on New Year's Day, because thin porridge is what poor households ate, and nobody wants to start the year poor. No nap, which predicts a lazy year, and nobody is shaken awake, since whoever is woken will be hurried for twelve months. Everyone gets up on their own.

Many families eat no meat at the first meal and kill nothing on the first day. The old texts had a reason that went further. The commentary on the Jingchu Suishiji gives each of the first seven days of the year to a creature: the first to the rooster, then the dog, the sheep, the pig, the ox and the horse, and the seventh to humankind, which is why the seventh is still Humans' Day. "Today," it says, no rooster is killed on the first day, no dog on the second, and so on down the list, and on the seventh no one is executed.

White and black are the colors of mourning, so an outfit entirely in white or entirely in black is what to avoid over the New Year, above all on the first day and when visiting older relatives. A white shirt under a red sweater is fine. Red is the color of the holiday, and new is better than old. Shoes are bought before the eve, not during the holiday, because xie, shoe, sounds like xie, evil.

The strangest of the rules is also the most widely kept: do not cut your hair in the first month, or your mother's brother will die. The barbers of China are busiest in the last weeks of the old year as a result. The explanation you will usually be given is political. When the Manchus forced every Chinese man to shave his forehead and wear the queue, the story goes, people refused to cut their hair in the first month out of "missing the old" dynasty, si jiu, which sounds like si jiu, "uncle dies." It is a good story, and it is probably not true.

The folklorist Wu Yucheng, writing in the Beijing Youth Daily in 2023, traced the rule to the wrong end of the year. The earliest records put it in the fifth month, the "evil month" of the Dragon Boat Festival, when the heat was thought to make everything dangerous. Kong Shangren, the late-seventeenth-century playwright, lists it among the customs of the Dragon Boat day: no haircut, for fear of harming an uncle. Pan Rongbi's eighteenth-century almanac of Beijing customs has people in the fifth month avoid moving house, avoid pasting new paper on the windows and mostly avoid haircuts, "for fear of harming the mother's brother." The same book calls the first month the "good first month," with the same rules about moving and windows. From there the haircut crossed over: a modern local history of Lushan, in Henan, lists "no haircut, no moving house, no pasting windows, no quarrels" as the rules of the good first month, and the summer rule has been forgotten.

• The eve. Clean the house, settle your debts, wash your hair, cook ahead. Do not go to bed early: staying up to see the year out is the custom, and the eve's rules about breaking things already apply.
• The first day, next on February 6, 2027. The long list above: no sweeping, washing, blades, money, medicine, porridge, naps, killing, tears or unlucky words.
• The second day. Married daughters go home to their parents. The laundry still waits.
• The third day, February 8, 2027. The Red Mouth day, or Red Dog day, when quarrels come easily, so in Hong Kong and Taiwan people stay home rather than pay New Year calls, and many sleep in.
• The fifth day, February 10, 2027. Breaking the Five. The Beijing almanac of 1900 says that within the five days no raw rice was cooked and women did not go out; on the fifth the rules lapse, the rubbish goes out, the shops reopen and the god of wealth is received.
• The whole first month. No haircut. Some families add no moving house.

The other rule of the season is personal. If your own sign clashes with the incoming year, the year itself is the thing to be careful with, and that is a different tradition, on our page on Tai Sui. The days themselves, with what each one is for, are on the Chinese New Year page.

Selectively, and with a smile. None of this is scripture. There is no book that orders a Chinese family to leave the floor dirty, and the old almanacs record the rules as what people did, not what they had to do. But the core of them is kept in an enormous number of homes, from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, by people who would tell you they are not superstitious. Nobody is sure the broom matters. Nobody wants to be the one who swept the luck out.

For a guest, four rules cover almost everything: do not tidy up, do not break anything (and if you do, say suisui ping'an), do not talk about death or illness, and do not turn up in all white or all black. Keep those and you will be doing better than most of the family's own children.