Ceremonies and lucky charms

Happiness, in the sense of good fortune, is 福 fú in Chinese. On the left, the radical 礻, a shortened form of 示, the altar for offerings; on the right, 畐, which the ancient forms draw as a well-filled jar ⟶ the full jar set on the altar, the favours people ask of their ancestors and of the gods. So the Chinese 福 is not first of all a feeling: it is an abundance, something that arrives and fills. For the happiness you feel, people rather say 幸福 xìngfú.

At New Year, the 福 is stuck on upside down (see our page Festivals). “The 福 is upside down” is 福倒了 fú dào le, exactly like 福到了 fú dào le, “good fortune has arrived”. The story goes that an illiterate servant stuck it on head down in the house of a Qing prince, and that a steward saved the servant’s neck with this pun. The tale exists in several versions, with different princes, and I couldn’t tell you which one is right. On the front door, however, many people stick it the right way up: a 福 turned over is also a jar being emptied.

The whole system rests on 谐音 xiéyīn, homophony. 八 bā, eight, sounds almost like 发 fā, to get rich; this fashion is often explained by Cantonese, where the two words are even closer, and by the rise of the South in the 1980s. The explanation is attractive, but I have no proof of it. Be that as it may, the Beijing Games opened on 8 August 2008. Conversely, 四 sì recalls 死 sǐ, to die, and many buildings have no fourth floor. Fish, 鱼 yú, sounds like 余 yú, surplus, hence the fish at the New Year’s Eve dinner; the bat, 蝠 fú, sounds like good fortune, hence the bats flying across old porcelain.

The same mechanism produces the taboos. You don’t give a clock, because 送钟 sòng zhōng is heard as 送终 sòngzhōng, to attend a dying person to the end (our page Social life already mentions it); nor an umbrella, as 伞 sǎn evokes 散 sàn, to part; and lovers don’t share a pear. If you break a bowl, all is not lost: you immediately say 碎碎平安 suìsuì píng'ān, because 碎, “in pieces”, is pronounced like 岁, the year ⟶ “peace every year”.

Colours follow the same logic. Red is joy, weddings and New Year; white is mourning. So watch out with envelopes: wedding money goes into a red envelope, funeral money into a white one. And yet people speak of 红白喜事 hóng bái xǐshì, the “happy events, red and white”, because the death of a very old person who passed away peacefully was also a kind of happiness.

Birthdays, for their part, were hardly celebrated in the past, except for children and elders. For an elder, you 做寿 zuòshòu, you celebrate their longevity, with 长寿面 chángshòumiàn, noodles that must never be cut, and 寿桃 shòutáo. In some regions, the sixtieth birthday is even celebrated at fifty-nine: 做九不做十, “celebrate the nine, not the ten”. Some say that 九 sounds like 久 jiǔ, a long time; others, that ten, too full, heralds decline. Both explanations are around, and I have nothing to settle the question.

The internet has added its own numbers. 520, which sounds roughly like 我爱你 wǒ ài nǐ, has made 20 May a second Valentine’s Day, and 1314, pronounced yāo sān yāo sì, promises 一生一世 yìshēng yíshì, “a whole lifetime”. Older, 二百五 èrbǎiwǔ, “two hundred and fifty”, means a dimwit. Why this number? The story goes that a silver ingot was worth five hundred taels and that half of one, 半封, sounded like 半疯, “half mad”. That is one of the explanations. There are others.

Every year counts too. The year of your sign, 本命年 běnmìngnián, is considered dangerous, so you wear a 红绳 hóngshéng, a red string around the wrist, if not red underwear (the twelve signs are presented on our page The twelve animals of the Chinese calendar).

Then there is the wisdom of the ancients, more cautious. An old man on the frontier loses his horse; his neighbours pity him, he replies that you never know. The horse comes back with a wild mare; his son falls while riding her and breaks his leg; war breaks out, and the lame son escapes conscription. That is 塞翁失马，焉知非福. Laozi had said it in ten characters, in the sentence that closes our examples: “Happiness is born of misfortune, misfortune lies hidden within happiness”, in the translation on our page Chapter 58 of the Tao Te Ching.

One last word, to make you smile. When a friend has put on a paunch, people politely say that he has 发福 fāfú, literally “his good fortune has grown”. The compliment cuts both ways.

Click on any character on the page: its stroke order is shown stroke by stroke, with the arrow that gives the direction of the movement.