Upside-down fu (福)

In old China, Columbia University’s Asia for Educators notes, the stalls before the New Year sold couplets and single auspicious characters handwritten on bright red paper for families who could not write their own, and on New Year’s Day the head of many educated households wrote auspicious characters or phrases himself, to be hung at the entrance.

The Qing emperors wrote fu characters every year. Zhaolian, a descendant of the princes of Li, recorded in his Xiaoting xulu that on the first day of the twelfth month the emperor returned from the Chanfu temple to the Jianfu palace and opened the year’s writing with fu characters “to welcome the new happiness”, giving them to all the princes and high officials of the inner court; the next day the favoured officials knelt before his desk in the Qianqing palace to receive one written in front of them. The custom began with the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662–1722) and became fixed under Yongzheng, the Prince Kung’s Palace Museum explains, and the Qianlong Emperor wrote that on the first day of the twelfth month he opened his brush “to write fu and bestow it on the princes and the officials within and without”, following his father’s practice. They wrote it with a great brush left by Kangxi and named “bestowing fortune on all people” (赐福苍生).

The most famous single fu is one Kangxi wrote that is carved on a stele in the garden of Prince Kung’s Mansion in Beijing, which the museum calls the best fu in China. Its strokes hide other characters: duo (many) at the upper right, tian (land) below it, zi (sons) and cai (talent) on the left, and shou (long life) on the right. A folk story says Kangxi wrote it to pray for his grandmother, the Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang, when she was gravely ill; the museum says whether this is true cannot be confirmed.