Duilian

Hand-painted Chinese New Year's duilian

In Chinese poetry, a duìlián (simplified Chinese: 对联; traditional Chinese: 對聯) or antithetical couplet is a pair of lines of poetry usually seen on the sides of doors leading to people's homes. The two lines have a one-to-one correspondence in their metrical length, and each pair of characters must have certain matching properties such as meaning and tone. A duilian is ideally profound yet concise, using one character per word in styles Classical Chinese. A special, widely-seen type of duilian is the chunlian, used as a New Year's decoration that expresses happy and hopeful thoughts for the coming year.

Requirements

A duilian must adhere to the following rules:

1. Both lines must have exactly the same number of Chinese characters.
2. The lexical category of each character must be the same as its corresponding character.
3. The tones need to be in order. This generally means if one character is of the first or second tone, its corresponding character must not be of the first or second tone.
4. The meaning of the two lines need to be related, with each pair of corresponding characters having related meanings too.

Example

Example of a duilian:

書山有路勤爲徑

shū shān yǒu lù qín wéi jìng

The mountain of books has one way and hard work serves as the path

學海無涯苦作舟

xué hǎi wú yá kǔ zuò zhōu

The sea of learning has no end and effort makes the boat

History

Originating during the Five Dynasties, flourishing during the Ming and Qing dynasties, duilian have a history of more than a thousand years.

In the past, there have been competitions where one person says one line of a couplet and others have had to compose a responding line that best matches the first.

See also

• Couplet

Gallery

External links

• China the beautiful web site on duilian and chunlian
• Hubert Delahaye, "The duilian, parallel and converging sentences. A few sociological aspects", Études chinoises, vol. XXI, n° 1-2, Spring-Fall 2002 (in French with English abstract)