Chinese New Year: What the Traditions Actually Mean

Every January, half the world’s newsrooms write about Chinese New Year, and most of them lead with the same line: the year of the whatever.

That is the least interesting thing about it. Behind the zodiac animal — a genuine but minor part of the holiday — is a set of customs that have survived for two millennia, each with a reason attached. The reasons are the good part.

This guide covers what the festival is, why everything is red, what each custom means, and why repetition matters more than novelty.

A Different New Year

The holiday is called Spring Festival in China. It begins on the first day of the first lunar month, which falls between late January and mid-February in the Gregorian calendar.

Two points are worth getting straight, because they are commonly muddled. First, this is not the Chinese equivalent of 1st January. It is the New Year of a different calendar, and it has its own traditions attached. Second, that calendar is lunisolar: months follow the moon, and the year is kept aligned with the seasons by the twenty-four solar terms.

That second point explains why the date moves every year, and why the seasonal markers in the background of this holiday are tied to the sun rather than the moon. China has never had one calendar. It has had two, running together, for a very long time.

Why Everything Is Red

Red is the colour of the festival, and almost every object involved is red: envelopes, lanterns, couplets, clothing, and the wrapping on the gifts.

One explanation is a folk story. A monster called Nian is said to have raided villages at the turn of the year. People discovered that it was afraid of the colour red, and of loud noises. You will hear this story told as a tradition rather than as history. It is a good story, but the text of it varies a great deal. It functions mainly as a way of explaining the customs to children.

The plainer explanation is that red has long been the colour of celebration, vitality and good fortune in China. Weddings are red, official seals were red, and good news is written on red paper. On a holiday about a fresh start, the colour is doing exactly the job you would expect.

The Cleaning, the Couplets, the Dumplings

Four customs carry most of the festival’s meaning.

The cleaning. A thorough house clean happens before the festival, and it is not primarily about hygiene. Sweeping out the old year is a way of clearing the house of the previous twelve months’ bad luck, so that the new year starts in an empty, clean space. This is worth noticing for its logic: the holiday does not begin with something added, but with something removed. (This is the same instinct that shows up in solar term purges and other Chinese seasonal customs.)

The couplets. Spring couplets are two strips of red paper posted either side of a doorway, with matching lines of poetry written on them. There is a rule to the form: the two lines have matching tones and grammatical structures. It is a folk art with real standards. It is also the most widely practised form of Chinese calligraphy in the world: millions of households paste hand-written characters on their doors every year. Schools and temples often give the couplets away; even now, most towns have street calligraphers who write them for a small fee.

The reunion dinner. The meal on New Year’s Eve is the most important of the year, and it is deliberately non-negotiable. The food carries meanings. In the north, families make dumplings, shaped like old silver ingots. In the south, a whole fish is standard — the word for fish sounds like the word for surplus, so a whole fish means “surplus for the year ahead”. Nian gao, a sticky rice cake, means “a higher year”. Nearly every dish on the table is doing wordplay, which is the subject of its own piece in our seasonal eating guide.

The fifteenth day. The festival ends with the Lantern Festival on the fifteenth of the month, a night of light displays and tangyuan — sweet round rice balls, whose shape means completeness. Fireworks and lantern shows close out the holiday about two weeks after it began.

Red Envelopes, and Who Gives Them To Whom

The red envelope is the other element people recognise instantly from outside China, and its etiquette is not obvious.

An envelope contains money, and it is given downwards in age: parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, older adults to younger ones. Traditionally, adults who are earning give them to those who are not. An unmarried adult in a large family can receive one well into middle age, which is a persistent source of comedy in China at this time of year.

They are also given to anyone who provides a service — staff, drivers, cleaners, couriers. The point is not the amount. The red paper is the gift; the money is what makes it useful.

Anyone on the receiving end of a Chinese holiday should know one thing: envelopes are given with both hands, and received the same way. Both hands, and a moment of eye contact, is the etiquette.

The Journey Home

Once a year, something happens in China that has no real equivalent anywhere else.

Roughly a two-week window around the festival is the world’s largest annual human migration. Hundreds of millions of journeys are made by train, bus, plane and motorbike. People working far from home travel back to the town or village they grew up in, then come back again a week later.

The scale is impressive, but the reason is the more interesting part. People will spend two nights in a hard seat, in a queue that lasts most of a day, to eat one meal at a particular table. The travel is not incidental to the holiday. The travelling is the holiday’s meaning being demonstrated: the reunion dinner is worth that much.

Things You Are Not Supposed to Do

The prohibitions are the funniest part of the festival, and they share one logic: how the year begins is how it will continue.

• Do not sweep or take out the rubbish on the first day. You would be sweeping the year’s good fortune out of the door. (Which is why the big clean happens beforehand.)
• Do not cut your hair. The word for hair sounds close to the word for prosperity in several dialects. To cut it is to cut your luck.
• Do not use sharp objects, or break anything. A dropped bowl should be caught with a joke — the standard recovery line involves saying the pieces mean peace all year.
• Do not say unlucky words. No talk of sickness, death or poverty on the first days of the year. Children are corrected gently and repeatedly.

Foreigners tend to find the list charming; families take it half seriously, which is exactly how folk customs work everywhere.

Why Repetition Is the Point

Here is the part that is easy to miss from the outside.

Most of what happens at Chinese New Year is identical every year. The same cleaning, the same dishes, the same couplets, the same exchange of envelopes with the same people. People complain that the festival feels less special than it used to — and the usual reason is not that the customs are worn out. It is that the repetition has been broken, by distance, migration, or a family member who is no longer there.

That is a useful thing for a reader over fifty to notice, because the arithmetic works in your favour. Twenty years of the same dumplings at the same table is not twenty identical evenings. It is a container that accumulates meaning, and the older the container, the more it holds.

The zoomed-out version of all this is the same argument as the 24 solar terms. A year with texture is easier to inhabit than a year of undifferentiated days. New Year is simply that idea with the volume turned up.

Common Questions

Is Chinese New Year a religious holiday? No. It has folk stories and family rituals, but no religious observance. Temple visits happen, and are optional.

Why does the date change? Because it is fixed to the lunar calendar, while the Gregorian calendar is solar. The two drift against each other, so the holiday moves between late January and mid-February.

Do people really take two weeks off? Officially the public holiday is about a week. In practice, the travel period runs longer, and many workplaces wind down for a fortnight.

What should I say to someone celebrating? Xin nian kuai le — happy new year. Or, for the southern greeting used widely in business settings, gong xi fa cai, which wishes prosperity.

Is the zodiac animal a big deal? It is a real part of the culture and a good conversation starter, but it is one of the smaller customs. The food, the family and the journey home matter far more.

The Same Table, Another Year

Chinese New Year is not really about a zodiac animal, fireworks or envelopes. It is a holiday built on the proposition that an ordinary repeated act - cooking the same meal for the same people - is worth protecting, and worth crossing a country for.

If you are near a Chinese community at festival time, go and look. If you have Chinese friends, ask what their family cooks. And if you have a table you return to every year, notice that the repetition is the gift.

For the calendar the holiday belongs to, read the 24 solar terms. For what appears on the table, start with seasonal eating the Chinese way. More of the year’s customs live in our Culture & Arts section.