What are Spring Festival couplets?

1, Spring Festival couplets, also known as "Spring Signs" and "Door Pairs", depict beautiful images and express good wishes with neat and concise words, which is a unique literary form of the Han nationality. Every Spring Festival, no matter in urban or rural areas, every household should choose red Spring Festival couplets and stick them on their doors to bid farewell to the old and welcome the new, so as to increase the festive atmosphere. Traditional Spring Festival couplets are written with a brush, but there are also printed Spring Festival couplets. There are many kinds of Spring Festival couplets, such as door to door and door to door.

2. Spring Festival couplets originated from ancient peach symbols. Fu Tao is a rectangular red board hanging on both sides of the gate. Write the names "Shen Tu" and "Lei Yu" on it to ward off evil spirits. During the Spring Festival, people always replace the old ones with the new ones. Spring Festival couplets began in the Five Dynasties. In 964 AD, Meng Changjun, the late ruler of Shu, first asked the bachelor Xin to write an inscription on the peach board, but he thought his writing was unstable, so he wrote "New Year, Festival Promise". "Changchun by himself. Since then, carving peach characters has evolved into writing Spring Festival couplets. Later, due to the mass production of paper, people gradually replaced red boards with paper. This is the beginning of posting Spring Festival couplets.

3. However, with the development of couplets today, with the popularization of vernacular Chinese and popular culture, people no longer pay so much attention to the strict antithesis principle, but a decent couplet should at least pay attention to equivalence in the choice of words, that is, the number of words and the part of speech should be relative. According to the norms of modern Chinese, nouns, adjectives, verbs, numerals and other phrases in the upper and lower couplets should be arranged in an orderly way, and the last word of each pair of upper and lower couplets should be at least even. Generally speaking, if the last word in the upper couplet is a hyphen (that is, the third and fourth sounds of Chinese Pinyin), then the last word in the lower couplet should be a flat tone (that is, the first and second sounds of Chinese Pinyin). This should be the minimum requirement for creating couplets, otherwise it is not called couplets, at least it is not a standard couplet.