Chinese New Year
Chinese New Year or the Spring Festival (see also § Names) is a festival that celebrates the beginning of a new year on the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar. Marking the end of winter and the beginning of spring, observances traditionally take place from Chinese New Year's Eve, the evening preceding the first day of the year, to the Lantern Festival, held on the 15th day of the year. The first day of Chinese New Year begins on the new moon that appears between 21 January and 20 February.[a]
This article is about the festival observed on the traditional Chinese calendar. For similar observances in other cultures, including a list of culture-specific articles, see Lunar New Year.Chinese New Year
Spring Festival, Lunar New Year
Chinese people and Sinophone communities[1]
Commemoration of the beginning of a new year on the traditional lunisolar Chinese calendar
Lion dances, dragon dances, fireworks, family gathering, family meal, visiting friends and relatives, giving red envelopes, decorating with chunlian couplets
First day of the first Chinese lunisolar month
22 January
10 February
29 January
Annual
"Spring Festival"
Chūn jié
Chūn jié
ㄔㄨㄣ ㄐㄧㄝˊ
Ch'un1 chieh2
Chun jié
Tshen tsiq
Chēun jit
Ceon1 zit3
Chhun cheh
Tshun tseh
農曆新年
农历新年
Nónglì xīnnián
Nónglì xīnnián
ㄋㄨㄥˊ ㄌㄧˋ ㄒㄧㄣ ㄋㄧㄢˊ
Nung2-li1 hsin1-nien2
Nóng-lì sin-nián
中國傳統新年
中国传统新年
Zhōngguó chuántǒng xīnnián
Zhōngguó chuántǒng xīnnián
ㄓㄨㄥ ㄍㄨㄛˊ ㄔㄨㄢˊ ㄊㄨㄥˇ ㄒㄧㄣ ㄋㄧㄢˊ
Chung1-kuo2 ch’uan2-tong3 hsin1-nien2
Jhongguó chuán-tǒng sin-nián
Chinese New Year is one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture. It has influenced similar celebrations in other cultures, commonly referred to collectively as Lunar New Year, such as the Losar of Tibet, the Tết of Vietnam, the Korean New Year, and the Ryukyu New Year.[3][4][5] It is also celebrated worldwide in regions and countries that house significant Overseas Chinese or Sinophone populations, especially in Southeast Asia. These include Singapore,[6] Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar,[7] the Philippines,[8] Thailand, and Vietnam. It is also prominent beyond Asia, especially in Australia, Canada, France, Mauritius,[9] New Zealand, Peru,[10] South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as in many European countries.[11][12][13]
The Chinese New Year is associated with several myths and customs. The festival was traditionally a time to honour deities as well as ancestors.[14] Within China, regional customs and traditions concerning the celebration of the New Year vary widely,[15] and the evening preceding the New Year's Day is frequently regarded as an occasion for Chinese families to gather for the annual reunion dinner. It is also a tradition for every family to thoroughly clean their house, in order to sweep away any ill fortune and to make way for incoming good luck. Another practiced custom is the decoration of windows and doors with red paper-cuts and couplets. Popular themes among these paper-cuts and couplets include good fortune or happiness, wealth, and longevity. Other activities include lighting firecrackers and giving money in red envelopes.
The Chinese New Year is often accompanied by loud, enthusiastic greetings, often referred to as 吉祥話 (jíxiánghuà) in Mandarin or 吉利說話 (Kat Lei Seut Wa) in Cantonese, loosely translated as auspicious words or phrases. New Year couplets printed in gold letters on bright red paper, referred to as chunlian (春聯) or fai chun (揮春), is another way of expressing auspicious new year wishes. They probably predate the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), but did not become widespread until then.[205] Today, they are ubiquitous with Chinese New Year.
Some of the most common greetings include:
Numerous other greetings exist, some of which may be exclaimed out loud to no one in particular in specific situations. For example, as breaking objects during the new year is considered inauspicious, one may then say 歲歲平安 (Suìsuì-píng'ān) immediately, which means "everlasting peace year after year". Suì (歲), meaning "age" is homophonous with 碎 (suì) (meaning "shatter"), in the demonstration of the Chinese love for wordplay in auspicious phrases. Similarly, 年年有餘 (niánnián yǒu yú), a wish for surpluses and bountiful harvests every year, plays on the word yú that can also refer to 魚 (yú meaning fish), making it a catch phrase for fish-based Chinese new year dishes and for paintings or graphics of fish that are hung on walls or presented as gifts.
The most common auspicious greetings and sayings consist of four characters, such as the following:
These greetings or phrases may also be used just before children receive their red packets, when gifts are exchanged, when visiting temples, or even when tossing the shredded ingredients of yusheng particularly popular in Malaysia and Singapore. Children and their parents can also pray in the temple, in hopes of getting good blessings for the new year to come.
Children and teenagers sometimes jokingly use the phrase "恭喜發財,紅包拿來" (pinyin: gōngxǐfācái, hóngbāo nálái; Cantonese: 恭喜發財,利是逗來; Jyutping: gung1hei2 faat3coi4, lei6 si6 dau6 loi4), roughly translated as "Congratulations and be prosperous, now give me a red envelope!". In Hakka the saying is more commonly said as 'Gung hee fatt choi, hung bao diu loi' which would be written as 恭喜發財,紅包逗來 – a mixture of the Cantonese and Mandarin variants of the saying.
Back in the 1960s, children in Hong Kong used to say 恭喜發財,利是逗來,斗零唔愛 (Cantonese, Gung Hei Fat Choy, Lai Si Tau Loi, Tau Ling M Ngoi), which was recorded in the pop song Kowloon Hong Kong by Reynettes in 1966. Later in the 1970s, children in Hong Kong used the saying: 恭喜發財,利是逗來,伍毫嫌少,壹蚊唔愛, roughly translated as, "Congratulations and be prosperous, now give me a red envelope, fifty cents is too little, don't want a dollar either." It basically meant that they disliked small change – coins which were called "hard substance" (Cantonese: 硬嘢). Instead, they wanted "soft substance" (Cantonese: 軟嘢), which was either a ten dollar or a twenty dollar note.