It is the most important traditional festival in our country. For modern Chinese people, all holidays are acceptable throughout the year, except for the Spring Festival.

Every year around the Spring Festival, even if you are thousands of miles away, you still have to rush back to your hometown, trying to reunite with your loved ones on New Year's Eve.

However, few people know that the "Spring Festival" as it is called today was not actually called this name. Compared with the "beginning of spring", a traditional festival with a history of four thousand years, the word "Spring Festival" is just a "new term".

The "Spring Festival" in ancient China was called "The Beginning of Spring" for a long time. However, "The Beginning of Spring" had nothing to do with "Celebrating the New Year" at first.

Until the founding of the Republic of China in 1912, January 1 of the Western calendar took away the name "New Year's Day" from the traditional "Spring Festival". In 1914, Yuan Shikai changed the name of the first day of the first lunar month to "Spring Festival". However, the name of this "Spring Festival" was "snatched" from "The Beginning of Spring".

Although "The Beginning of Spring" has received some neglect since the Tang Dynasty, it is still a serious "Spring Festival". As a result, after this change, it was completely reduced to a small "solar term" that no one cared about.

1. Before the Tang Dynasty, "Spring Festival" and "New Year" were two concepts

China's Spring Festival originated from the ancient sacrificial activities of the twelfth lunar month. Earlier, it may have been related to witchcraft and divination. things related. During the Xia Dynasty, people celebrated the "Beginning of Spring" every year as a festival, which was called the "Spring Festival".

Later, the Xia Dynasty was replaced by the Shang Dynasty, and the Shang Dynasty was replaced by the Zhou Dynasty. Until the Han Dynasty, in other dynasties, most of the time, the Chinese held celebrations on the day of "The Beginning of Spring", so "Spring Festival" is the "Festival of the Beginning of Spring". Only during the Southern and Northern Dynasties, "Spring Festival" was used to refer to the entire spring.

This situation did not change until the Tang Dynasty. Because the dates of "Spring Festival" and "New Year's Day (the first day of the first lunar month)" were similar, they were "bundled" together for celebration. Coupled with the influence of festivals such as "Winter Solstice" and "Lantern Festival", "Spring Festival" becomes less prominent.

After talking about the "Spring Festival", let's talk about the "New Year" in ancient times. The "New Year" mentioned here refers to the "New Year" in a narrow sense, specifically referring to the annual "New Year" celebrations. The specific time of this "year" had been changing with the succession of dynasties before Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty.

The "New Year" of the Xia Dynasty was the first day of the first lunar month every year, so they "celebrated the New Year" on the first day of the first lunar month. However, the "New Year's Day" of the Shang Dynasty was the first day of the twelfth lunar month, while the "New Year's Day" of the Zhou Dynasty became the first day of the eleventh lunar month. In the Qin Dynasty, it became the first day of October in the lunar calendar. The "New Year" of each dynasty is one month earlier than the previous dynasty.

When it comes to the Qin Dynasty’s “New Year” on the “first day of October”, it reminds me of a little gossip. In the past, when we watched TV series, when ancient people went to restaurants to eat noodles, they would often mention something called "Yangchun Noodles".

In the past, people often discussed on the Internet what kind of noodles this "Yangchun Noodle" is. Later, someone discovered through research that it was actually just a bowl of the most ordinary plain noodles. Because in a certain period in ancient times, this plain noodles sold for ten cents a bowl, and October was also called "Little Indian Spring" in that era. So, "Yangchun" was used instead of "Ten", and the noodles worth "ten cents" were called "Yangchun noodles".

Now it seems that this "ancient" refers to the Qin Dynasty. Because the Qin people "celebrate the New Year" in October, and once the new year is over, the next festival is the "Spring Festival", so "October" is also called "Little Indian Spring".

The "New Year" and the "Spring Festival" were so parallel that they came to the Han Dynasty. During the period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, he created the "Taichu Calendar" and changed the "first day of the year" back to the first day of the first lunar month of the lunar calendar. In this way, the "beginning of spring" is closer to the "new year".

So during the Tang Dynasty, or earlier, people celebrated these two festivals together with the Winter Solstice and the Lantern Festival.

2. The modern "Spring Festival"

We have mentioned before that since the "New Year" and the "beginning of spring" have become closer, the "New Year" and the "Spring Festival" are almost the same They got together to celebrate, and this probably happened in the Tang Dynasty.

In the Tang Dynasty, the first day of the first lunar month was called "Yuan Zheng".

Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty promulgated the "Fake Ning Order" to stipulate how to take holidays. It says that "Yuan Zheng" and "Winter Solstice" both have a seven-day holiday.

During the Song Dynasty, the first day of the first lunar month was called "New Year's Day". According to regulations, the holiday lasted from the first day of the first lunar month to the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the first lunar month. But in fact, the holidays for local officials in the Song Dynasty started on the 20th of the twelfth lunar month of the previous year and lasted until the 20th of February of the following year. As long as you can go back before February 20th, it won't be considered "absent from work." Only the officials in the capital are in a worse situation. Sometimes they have to go to work on the first day of the first lunar month.

Because the Song Dynasty had a holiday from the twentieth day of the twelfth lunar month, the "Spring Festival" (beginning of spring) was generally included. Coupled with the Lantern Festival Lantern Festival, the "New Year" became more and more lively, and people gradually stopped talking about the "Spring Festival". However, the name "Spring Festival" still belongs to "Beginning of Spring".

The situation in the Ming and Qing Dynasties was similar to that in the Song Dynasty. It's just that officials in the Ming and Qing Dynasties were not as happy as those in the Song Dynasty, but they could still take about a month off on New Year's Day.

It was not until 1912 that the Republic of China was established. In order to show its break with the feudal era, the Republic of China government began to adopt the Western calendar, which is now the Gregorian calendar, and designated January 1 of the Gregorian calendar as "New Year's Day".

The name "New Year's Day" was taken from "the first day of the first lunar month". So there were two "New Year's Days" at that time, one for the Gregorian calendar and one for the lunar calendar.

In 1913, during the Yuan Shikai period, there was a chief of internal affairs named Zhu Qiqian. He proposed to Yuan Shikai that four festivals should be established: Spring, Beginning of Summer, Beginning of Autumn, and Beginning of Winter in order to arrange the work and rest time of government agency staff and people across the country. At the same time, the first month of the lunar calendar is designated as the "Spring Festival", the Dragon Boat Festival is designated as the "Summer Festival", the Mid-Autumn Festival is designated as the "Autumn Festival", and the winter solstice is designated as the "Winter Festival".

In the end, Yuan Shikai only agreed to designate the first month of the first lunar month as the "Spring Festival". So starting from the next year, that is, 1914, the first day of the first lunar month of the lunar calendar was fixed as the "Spring Festival".

Conclusion

The "Spring Festival" was originally the exclusive festival of "The Beginning of Spring", but with the changes of the times, the "Beginning of Spring" has gradually been left out. The same thing happened to it as "Hanshi", which had also been absorbed and merged by "Qingming" since the Tang Dynasty.

Some of the original customs of these ancient festivals were moved to other festivals and retained; while others have completely disappeared in the long river of history.

For example, Su Dongpo's "Reducing Characters Mulan Hua Ji Mao Dan Er Chun Ci" in the Song Dynasty mentioned a "Spring Festival" custom called "Spring Cow Beating". This custom has been very popular since at least the Eastern Han Dynasty.

"Spring Cow Beating" is also called "Spring Whip", which refers to beating clay sculptured cows during the Chinese New Year. The specific process is unclear. All I know is that after breaking it into pieces, each family will get the pieces of the clay cow and put them in their own cow trough. And then what? Because it was so long ago, modern people don’t know about it.

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