Pictures of door gods, guardians that frighten demons from the entry to a building, are replaced each New Year as part of the annual cleaning and painting and generalized renewal that always precedes the New Year festival. But during the Ten Kingdoms period (Shíguó 十国, period 14, 900s AD), Emperor Mèngchǎng 孟昶 of the state of Later Shǔ 后蜀 (period 14-i) decided that a particularly beautiful spring merited something more, so he ordered a couplet to be written and inscribed at either side of the palace door.
The problem was to find an appropriate text, one worthy of the beautiful spring.
When none of the courtiers could come up with a couplet worthy of the spring, he penned one himself. And thus began the custom of writing door couplets for the New Year.
What the emperor wrote was simple but eloquent. It read:
新年纳余庆。佳节号长春。
Xīnnián nà yúqìng. Jiājié hào chángchūn.
The new year brings cause for great celebration.
The joyous festival announces eternal spring.
It is said that early couplets were written on peach-wood planks so as to have exorcistic power (since it is obvious to everybody that peach wood scares away baleful forces), and so the peach-wood planks were called “peach charms” (táofú 桃符), a name that is still sometimes used even for the paper couplets. The imagery of the exorcistic peach branch remains in some New Year couplets to this day.
Emperor Tàizǔ 太祖 of the Míng 明 dynasty (reign 20a-1, 1368-1398) was particularly keen on New Year couplets, and even decreed that every family be required to post couplets for New Year. The emperor had been born a peasant and had become emperor after leading a revolution, and he was barely literate himself. It is a reasonable, if uncharitable, speculation that couplets were about as much as his level of classical literacy was up to appreciating. Another reasonable, but also uncharitable, speculation is that he demanded universal couplets so that people would think he was a great fancier of poetry and obviously very literate indeed.
One year Emperor Tàizǔ was making one of his frequent incognito tours among the peasants when he came upon a butcher shop that did not display any couplets. He confronted the butcher and asked how he dared to defy imperial policy in this way. The butcher replied that he loved both couplets and the emperor, but was, alas, illiterate. So the emperor composed a couplet with his own rather clumsy handwriting and presented it to him. It read:
两手劈开生死路。一刀割断是非根。
Liǎngshǒu pīkāi shēngsǐ lù. Yīdāo gēduàn shìfēi gēn.
Two hands cut open the road of life and death;
One knife cleaves apart the roots of truth and falsehood.
The couplet was linked to the butcher’s trade, and some people thought it was uplifting, but many found it disgusting and inappropriate to the joy of the New Year festival. However it was soon discovered that the emperor himself had composed it, and immediately everyone praised the ugly calligraphy and claimed to be inspired by the novel and striking imagery. The text itself has lived forever as a brilliant piece of composition, despite its absence of rhyme, its idiom of violence, and its very marginal literary elegance.
Spring couplets are inevitably positive in tone, intended to look on the bright side of things and to wish for good things in the year to come.
Many of them are hortatory, however, urging people to behave well, and sometimes even to suffer in doing so. A couplet for students proposed by one author reads:
书山有路勤为径。学海无涯苦作舟。 Shūshān yǒu lù, qín wèi jìng. Xuéhǎi wú yá, kǔ zuò zhōu.
Diligence is the pathway through the mountain of books;
Bitter effort is a lifeboat on the limitless sea of learning.
That means if you are a student you should stop reading frivolous stories like this and get back to work.