How did the New Year pictures in traditional culture come from?

The origin of New Year pictures: Every Spring Festival, people like to buy some bright and pleasing New Year pictures and stick them on doors or indoors to add a peaceful atmosphere to the Spring Festival. Posting New Year pictures during the Spring Festival has a long history in China. New Year pictures, called "door paintings" in ancient times, were originally called "door paintings". According to Custom Yi Tong, in the pre-Qin and Han Dynasties, there was a custom of worshipping the door in religious belief, so Shen Tu and Lei Yu became the earliest gods in China. The Jin Dynasty Zonggu's Chronicle of Jingchu said: "On the first day of the first month, Er Shen attached a household, with Shen Tu on the left and the base on the right, commonly known as the door god."

Cai Lun invented paper in the Eastern Han Dynasty. Before the Tang Dynasty, most of them were hand-painted door gods. The role of door keeper is not a legendary image, but a real person. People generally say that the white-faced general in the door gods is Qin from Licheng (now Jinan, Shandong), and the black-faced general is Hu Jingde from Shuozhou (now Shuoxian, Shanxi). Li Shimin Biography records that during the reign of Emperor Taizong, Li Shimin suffered from nightmares. Every night, he hears ghosts screaming, which makes him uneasy and uneasy. A minister said, "sending a general to guard the door will definitely drive away ghosts." General Qin,, volunteered, armed to the teeth, holding a sword in one hand and a whip in the other, standing on both sides of the palace gate and guarding it all night. Taizong's illness has really recovered. Emperor Taizong was overjoyed, but opening the door to the generals was not a long-term policy. The painter was ordered to paint the mighty images of the two generals on the palace gate, and later generations followed suit, painting them on paper or carving them on boards. Because Qin and Weichi Gong were both generals, the door gods in the Tang Dynasty mostly appeared as mighty generals. In addition, folk painters have artistically processed their images on the basis of the legends of Tang history, so they have gradually evolved into the "door gods" of New Year pictures.