The Chinese New Year paintings are often painted with lotus flowers and carp, what is the meaning of the expression?

Nianhua is a kind of Chinese painting, which began in ancient times as "door god painting", one of the Chinese folk art, and is also one of the common folk crafts. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), they were officially called "New Year's Paintings", a unique genre of painting in China, and a popular form of art among the rural Chinese. Most of them are used for posting on New Year's Day to decorate the environment, and contain the meaning of blessing the New Year with good luck and celebration, hence the name.

Traditional folk New Year's paintings are mostly watermarked on wood. Old New Year's paintings have different names because of the size of the painting and the amount of processing. The whole large called "Palace tip", a paper three open called "San Cai". Processing more and more detailed called "painting Palace tip", "painting Sanjai". Those painted with gold powder in color are called "Golden Palace Tip" and "Golden Sanjai". Products made before June are called "Green Edition" and those made after July or August are called "Autumn Edition".

Nianhua is a kind of auspicious image in ancient China. Over the long years, with the evolution of the New Year's festival customs and derived from the formation of a special Chinese folk symbolic decorative art, its origin can be traced back to the ancient human concept of nature worship and the concept of belief in the gods. Early Chinese New Year paintings were closely related to the two mother themes of driving away evil spirits and praying for good luck and welcoming good fortune. In the process of customizing the New Year's Day customs such as praying for a good harvest, worshipping ancestors and driving away demons and monsters, New Year's Day decorative arts adapted to them gradually emerged.

The Spring Festival hanging stickers in urban and rural areas is also very common, thick black colorful New Year's paintings to thousands of families added a lot of prosperity and joy of the festive atmosphere. New Year paintings are an ancient folk art in China, reflecting the people's simple customs and beliefs, and holding their hopes for the future. New Year paintings, like spring scrolls, originated as "door gods". With the rise of woodblock printing, the content of New Year's paintings was not limited to monotonous themes such as door gods, but became colorful.

Broadly speaking, all the folk artists and by the workshop industry carving and painting and management, to depict and reflect the folk life as a feature of the paintings, can be categorized as New Year's paintings. The custom of New Year's paintings reflects the spiritual solace and spirituality of the ancients.

Later, with the development of society, mankind's worship of nature was gradually transformed into the worship and belief in social personality gods, from the earliest peach symbols, reed ropes, golden roosters, and sacred tigers, to Shentian and Yubi, and later on Guan Yu, Zhao Yun, Yuchigong, Qin Shubao and other martial arts generals, and gods and goddesses such as Zhong Kui, Tianshi and Dongfang Shuo, during which there was a distinctive trajectory of development.

The end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, "Customs and Folklore - Rituals," said: "So the county officials often to wax Eve, decorated with peach people, hanging reed water bamboo, painted tigers in the door, all to follow the example of the previous event in order to defend the evil also." Cai Yong "dictate" said: "God tea, Yu base and body in its door, the main read leading the ghosts, the evil ghosts, the reed rope, eating tiger. Therefore, the December year after all, often with the first wax night by removing it. Is painted tea, base and hanging reed rope in the portal to defend against murder.