Pasting Spring Festival Pictures

To mark the Spring Festival, people like to put up pictures of certain favorite motifs on doors and walls.

This is referred to as pasting New Year pictures, one of the Spring Festival customs. The birth of the custom is said to date back to the times of Yao and Shun. Of the different kinds of New Year pictures, the door picture is of the longest standing. It varies with times in the motif. Before the Tang Dynasty the two leafs of a door were respectively pasted with the pictures of two generals, one named Shen Tu and the other Yu Lei. The two, according to the Classic of the Geographical Features and Customs, were good at subduing ghosts and monsters, hence they were taken as motifs for the door pictures to ward off evil spirits. In the Tang Dynasty Qin Shubao and Yuchi Jingde, two famous generals of that dynasty, began to appear in the door pictures in place of Shen Tu and Yu Lei.

The change is linked to a legend. Li Shimin, the emperor Taizong of the Tang Dynasty, once seemed to often hear ghosts and gobins throwing brick-tile debris and wailing at night. This put him on pins and needles so muck that he could handly fall asleep. Qin Shubao suggested that he himself and Yuchi Jingde keep guard for the emperor at the court gate. Extremely perturbed, Li Shimin agreed. So the two generals did as they suggested, both in martial attire, one holding a sword and the other having an iron lash in hand. It was so strange that the imperial court really became peaceful. Later people, therefore, began to paste the door pictures of the two generals for peace.

From the Song Dynasty ( 960-1279 ), door pictures began to bear the images of Wang Zhaojun, Zhao Feiyan, Ban Ji and Lu Zhu, and Yue Fei and Zheng Chenggong, the first four being great beauties and the last two being famous national heroes in ancient China.

Today, the door pictures are mainly produced in YangliuqingTown in west Tianjin, Weixian Country of Shangdong and Taohuang of Suzhou in Jiangsu. They are products of watercolor block printing, characterized by simple lines, bright colors, and lively scenes.

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