Pelfy’s Journey Of Love

Whilst Englishmen decorate their houses on Halloween and Christmas with carved pumpkins and stockings, the Chinese decorates their houses with spring couplets.

Spring couplets are known as ‘chun lian’ It is a special type of ‘duilian’, or couplet. It is used during the Chinese New Year where families decorate their front doors with poetic couplets of calligraphy written with fragrant India ink, expressing of life’s renewal and the return of spring.

Research shown that the spring couplets originated from ‘peach wood charms’, door gods painted on wood charms in earlier times. Today, Chinese characters are written on vertical strips of red paper in the best calligraphy style.

Usually, the first line (called upper) is posted on the right side of the front door whereas the second line (called lower) is posted on the left side of the front door. A third horizontal piece may be posted across and on top the door. In addition, it is common to hang calligraphic writing of the Chinese characters for ’spring’, ‘wealth’ and ‘blessing’. Some people will even invert the drawings of blessing since the Chinese for ‘inverted’ is a homonym in Chinese for ‘arrive’, thus signifying that spring , wealth or blessing has arrived.

The rat is holding the spring couplet. I do not have a picture of it, but will certainly update one when I have photographed it.