BJ: After Work with SwedCham: Understanding Chinese Spring Festival

Welcome to join us for the After Work with SwedCham to meet old and new friends and kick off our very first event in 2020!

While enjoying two free drinks,finger food, amazing view on the 50th floor at the Capital Club (京城俱乐部) and you are also welcome to be very creative and experience the traditional Chinese New Year culture by writing the Fu (福) character or lucky New Year couplets (chunlian 春联) with one invited calligrapher which you can take home or office for New Year decoration or just give it to your colleagues or friends as a special new year gift!

The Fu characters and Spring Festival Couplets:

During Chinese New Year, people have a long list of things to do. From one week preceding the festival to the 15th day after, many Chinese New Year customs are widely observed for thousands of years. Among those customs, the Fu characters and Spring Festival couplets are essential Chinese New Year decorations.This tradition is widely kept both in modern cities and rural areas of China.

The Fu ( 福）character in Chinese means 'blessing' and 'good fortune' so that this character appears frequently in the New Year. Interestingly, people always choose to paste it upside down on the door or window because the inversion in Chinese called "dao" has the same pronunciation with the 'coming' （到了) in Chinese. An inverted Fu character means the good fortune is coming.

Couplets (春联) are typically pasted on doorways as a part of the festival's decoration. The custom of pasting Spring Festival couplets can be traced back over 1,000 years to the Later Shu State (934 - 965). The original form of modern couplets was called "Taofu", a piece of peach wood protecting against evil without any writing on. In the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279), the antithetical couplets began to be written on the wood to express people's good wishes. Later, the modern form of couplets appeared replacing the peach wood with the red paper. The couplets include two vertical scrolls on two sides and a horizontal scroll on the top.

上联：迎新春事事如意 [yíng xīn chūn shì shì rú yì]

下联：接鸿福步步高升 [jiē hóng fú bù bù gāo shēng]

横批：好事临门 [hǎo shì lín mén]

Upper Scroll: Everything goes well as you expect

Lower Scroll: Career rises steadily as you want

Horizontal Scroll: Luck Knocks on the Door

Event Details:

When: January 10th, 18:30-20:30

Venue: Capital Club 京城俱乐部

Address: 50F Capital Mansion, 6 Xin Yuan Nan Road, Chaoyang District

北京市朝阳区新源南路6号, 京城大厦50层

Price: 230 RMB/Member; 280 RMB/Non-members (Including 2 drinks, finger food and couplets materials)

Dresscode at Capital Club: NO jeans or sneakers

会议场所着装要求：请避免穿着牛仔裤或者运动鞋参会