Qing Qianlong's "Pujiang County Records Customs Year" contains: "The year will be removed, the door gods will be changed, the peach symbols will be changed, and the spring stickers will be written." In Song Dynasty, Hanlin wrote "Posting Poems" and posted them on the forbidden account eight times a year. The posts written by beginning of spring are called "Spring Posts", which are mostly five-character or seven-character quatrains with beautiful style. Later, it spread to the people and became Spring Festival couplets, and then gradually developed into couplets.
Throughout the ages, Spring Festival couplets are an indispensable thing for urban and rural residents in China to celebrate the New Year. No matter how poor and remote people are, they should also post Spring Festival couplets. In recent years, people who are good at books in the village have been busy writing Spring Festival couplets for everyone every day. There are also many stalls writing Spring Festival couplets in the market. Before the founding of New China, many people could not read. It is said that on the first day of the first month of a certain year, a farmer in the eastern mountainous area of Pujiang went to the grave with sacrifices and passed by a village. He saw the horizontal batch on the lintel of a house upside down and said, "Why is this horizontal batch upside down?" At the same time, he used rice grains to help re-paste. When I came back from the grave, I looked at the banner again, but it was upside down. Asked the shopkeeper, the answer is that I heard people say that it was posted backwards, and I quickly corrected it after I got up. So I smiled at each other. I also heard that someone misplaced the gods and couplets of "Chef Jun" and "Zhu Jun". On the kitchen stove, "the daily weight is one thousand kilograms, and the night weight is twenty-two thousand kilograms", and on the stigma, "Heaven speaks well, and the lower bound is safe" has caused many jokes.
Spring Festival couplets are characterized by conciseness and preciseness, neat antithesis, and appeal to both refined and popular tastes. If you want to have "spring", you can't escape the times. 1963 During the "Small Four Cleanups" campaign, two of them faced Yiwu Agriculture, Forestry and Water Conservancy Bureau across the river. One family's Spring Festival couplets are "loyal, leave room and keep unlimited secrets", and the other family's Spring Festival couplets are "the gate of agriculture, forestry and water conservancy, guarding a king kong". That year, I went to the countryside to a small village in the western mountainous area of Shizhai, Pujiang. The commune leader took me to see a pair of Spring Festival couplets: "The people are not happy, and the people are not happy." After reading it, he asked me, "Do these two sentences seem to have problems?" I replied that he seemed to be Confucius, and there was some truth in the content. I went home to see the Analects of Confucius and found this sentence in Yan Yuanzhang. It turns out that in the Spring and Autumn Period, Lu Aigong asked Confucius' students whether the tax rate could be raised if the country was short of money and food. If so, he gave such an answer. After I asked the cadres of the brigade, I realized that the owner had done a "fake job". At that time, the string of class struggle became more and more tense. Anyone who pursued it would at least be criticized and "suffer".
1973, near Yutai, Puyang Town, I saw two pairs of Spring Festival couplets, one is "Wancun Ficus people leave their arrows, and every family sings ghosts", and the other is "Red flags roll up serf halberds, and black hands hang high the whip of overlord". They are copied from Mao Zedong's poems "To mourn for God" and "To Shaoshan", but their meanings are reversed. The first is about the serious harm caused by schistosomiasis in the old society; The latter pair of "black hands" and "overlord whip" refer to the bloody suppression of the peasant revolutionary armed forces by the reactionary ruling class. There is a "counter-revolutionary" black Xiao Mu card nailed to the door. I advised them to put on a pair quickly. They said it was "Chairman Mao's words", but they didn't change it after all. At that time, it was in the "Cultural Revolution". Fortunately, the "rebels" lack culture. If they really find out, it will definitely be another vicious fight, adding to the crime. Others joked about the improper choice of conjunctions. 1975 in the first month, I went to the countryside and passed by a village with a big meal. The host of the family insisted that we sit down and drink, and the newly married couple were also very polite. The Spring Festival couplets in front of his house are "cultivating new flowers in the motherland and bringing up revolutionary successors", and the horizontal criticism is "United struggle", and everyone can't help laughing. It may be unlucky to use couplets suitable for the education department for marriage, but it may be unlucky to use couplets.
After the reform and opening up, the excellent cultural tradition of having both ability and political integrity, people and Spring Festival couplets has been further inherited and carried forward. New couplets are published in newspapers and magazines every year. County cultural departments and calligraphy associations organize calligraphers to write Spring Festival couplets in the countryside every year. At the end of the year, there were hundreds of stalls writing Spring Festival couplets in county towns and markets. Once upon a time, the Spring Festival couplets and lanterns at the gates of towns, villages, streets and alleys complemented each other. This is the biggest exhibition of calligraphy and lighting in a year, and it has also become a beautiful scenery during the Spring Festival.