About Spring Festival Folk Customs

Throughout history, the date of the beginning of the Spring Festival has not been consistent, with the Shang Dynasty celebrating the month of Lunar New Year and the Zhou Dynasty celebrating the month of November. After the unification of China, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty promulgated the Tai Chu Calendar, and the first day of the first month of the lunar year once again became the "first day of the year", which has continued into the present day. The origin of the Spring Festival is inextricably linked to agricultural production. As a typical East Asian agricultural country, China's deep agricultural foundation makes people have the deepest affection for spring, and there are many customs related to the Spring Festival, but with the evolution of the region and time, many of these customs have already disappeared.

▲Celebration of the Spring Festival

Because of the vast radiation of the traditional Chinese civilization, most Asian countries have the custom of celebrating the New Year, such as: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, North Korea and so on, and the Spring Festival is still one of the most important festivals. Popular customs such as setting off firecrackers, putting up Spring Festival couplets, and wearing new clothes are still active in the arena of modern civilization, however, there are also many Chinese New Year folklore that have disappeared, many of which are extremely elegant. Among these elegant folklore, only one is left in our country nowadays, while Japan and South Korea, which are separated by a river, still have two.

▲Posting Spring Festival couplets

The first is to welcome the spring in green. According to the record of the Book of Rituals of the Later Han Dynasty, "on the day of the first spring, before the night leaks for five moments, all the officials of the capital were dressed in green clothes". In ancient China, every time the Spring Festival came, all the people from the royal family down to the peddlers would change into green clothes to welcome its arrival. Influenced by the agricultural civilization, the ancient Chinese believed that the Spring Festival was the season of recovery and renewal, and that the sky, earth, mountains and rivers were verdant. Therefore, the ancients used the color green as the color symbol for the Spring Festival, and the god of Spring was also called "Qingdi".

▲Japan's Spring Festival Shrine Prayer

The second event is the drinking of chili pepper wine or tusu wine, which is widely consumed in contemporary society. As a spice widely consumed in contemporary society, pepper, unlike chili peppers, which are an imported product, has a long history as it was originally native to the Qinling region of China. The Jing Chu chronicle of peppercorns states: "All the elders and children were properly dressed, and in order to pay their respects, they were given pepper and cypress wine."In the Jing Chu region at that time, the ancients would drink pepper and cypress wine made from pepper and cypress branches during the Spring Festival. Throughout the dynasties, the wine has evolved to include more complex ingredients and symbols, and the Tusu wine was born. Today, however, the custom is extinct in China, with only glimpses of it in Okinawa, Japan, Amami Oshima and South Korea.

▲Ingredients of the seven-herb congee

The third item is to eat the seven-herb congee. According to the book "Zhanshu" written by Dongfang Shuo, the seventh day of the first month of the lunar calendar is the day when Nuwa created man, and it is also known as the "Day of Man". Not only do officials hold ceremonies, but ordinary people also use watercress, water chestnuts, radishes, turnips, turnips, bushes, sagebrush, and daikatsura, which are all fresh vegetables from the early spring, to make congee. This seven-vegetable congee is believed to welcome the new year and remove the bad luck. This custom was introduced to Japan during the Tang Dynasty and was widely accepted during the Edo period in that country. Seven-herb congee is often seen in Japan today, while it has long since disappeared in China.

▲Chunpan

The fourth item is to eat the spring pan and bite the spring. According to the Qing Dynasty's "Imperial Capital Chronicle", the ancient people would eat the pastries mixed with seasonal vegetables such as lettuce, green leeks, green onions and cabbage skins, and eat them raw with water carrots, a custom known as chunzhun (biting spring). In the Jin Dynasty period, the ancients will leeks, green onions, watercress, radish and other five vegetables shredded spread on the plate, named "five Xin plate", later also known as "spring plate". They believed that eating food with a pungent flavor after a winter's hibernation, when the grass and trees were growing vigorously, would be extremely beneficial to human health. Today, contemporary Chinese still make spring rolls and spring dishes, but they are not as rigorously prepared as they were in ancient times, and the vegetables they use have been replaced with things like seaweed, lettuce and vermicelli.

▲Koreans celebrating the Spring Festival

The fifth item is the wind. According to the "Essentials", "Lie Zi, a man of the wind," needed to return to the eight wildernesses on the day of the Spring Festival, and wherever the wind blew, grass and trees grew. Of course, for the ancient Chinese, traveling on the wind was obviously impossible, and they had a more practical approach. According to the Jade Spring Records, people take young bamboo as a tube, put grass ash in the bamboo tube, the slightest breeze of spring to take away the fly ash, known as "Phragmites tube fly ash".

▲Hairpin

The sixth item, hairpin, picking flowers, giving flowers. During the Spring Festival period, people would pick many fresh flowers and the emperor would give them to his ministers as a reward. However, not many flowers bloomed in the Spring Festival, and ordinary people could only use colored paper to make flowers to wear. After the Tang and Song dynasties, the custom became more widespread, and even the oldest old would wear flowers as a sign of honor.

▲Xitang Hanfu Festival

Nowadays, you can often see young people wearing Hanfu costumes on the streets and alleys, and the "Hanfu fever" is still flourishing. This is another way of showing that some of China's traditional cultural phenomena are being revived. As the most traditional festival of the Chinese nation, the Chinese New Year still has some of its best practices.