Chinese New Year is one of the most important holidays in Chinese culture. It has influenced similar celebrations in other cultures, commonly referred to collectively as Lunar New Year.
It is also celebrated worldwide in regions and countries that house significant Overseas Chinese populations, especially in Southeast Asia.
One way to celebrate Chinese New Year this year is to read some poetry in books from the Thammasat University Library collection.
Here are some examples, as posted online:
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Snow on New Year’s Eve
by Lu You
In early morning, a north wind brings snow;
It’s a blessing from Heaven arriving in time.
I haven’t yet raised my half cup of Tusu wine to toast the New Year;
Busy writing peach wood charms by lamplight.
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Lunar New Year of Jiawu (1714)
by Kong Shangren
Despite thinning white hair,
I stayed up for a night to feast on New Year’s Eve.
The burning candle urges me to drink up;
I emptied my pocket, giving children coins for good luck.
Hearing the noise of firecrackers, I’m cheerful like a child;
Seeing new spring couplets hang, I sense closure of the old year.
Listening to the “Plum Blossom” tune one more time;
Soon, the day breaks and people greet one another with laughter.
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Poem on Selling Silliness
by Fan Chengda
On New Year’s Eve, no one is asleep at midnight,
They pray to gods for blessings, and wait for the New Year to arrive.
A group of children hawk along the street, saying they have “silliness” for sale.
But who doesn’t have silliness? There’s enough in the city and more to spare.
From south to north in the alley, they laugh and banter, but couldn’t make a sale.
An old man sitting behind curtains asks: How much for your silliness?
The children answer: grandpa doesn’t need to pay money, you can be in our debts for hundreds and thousands of years.
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New Year’s Eve
by Wen Zhengming
Others are busy celebrating the New Year, but I’m sorting old poems under the lamp.
Don’t laugh at me for being pedantic; my most important achievements of the year are poems and prose.
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Stay Up Late on New Year’s Eve
by Su Shi
The old year is parting,
Like a snake slithering into a deep ravine.
Scales barely seen; none could stop its course.
Try as hard as we might to grab its tail, but in vain.
Children strive to stay awake, laugh and play all night long.
Rooster, please don’t crow yet, but the morning drum is urging.
The lamp has burnt out, and the Big Dipper decends on the horizon.
Year after year, time flies and my worries are futile.
Better to cherish this night, and I still have the spirit of a young man.
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An Extremely Cold Night in Taiyuan on New Year’s Eve
by Yu Qian
Please tell the friends living afar, the weather is chilly but no need to worry.
The spring wind is arriving and quite close to us, touching the eastern end of our house.
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New Year Day
by Wang Anshi
With the noise of firecrackers, the old year has passed away;
The spring breeze has infused warmth in the Tusu wine.
When the rising sun shines on the doors of each household,
New peach wood charms are put up to replace the old.
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What Will the New Year Bring?
by Cui Tu
The road to Ba is a long, long way
Still, I make this perilous journey of ten thousand li
In the melting snow beneath jagged mountains at night
A stranger in a strange land
Alone, gradually growing distant from family and friends
And closer instead to my companions
How does one bear moving from place to place,
What will the New Year bring?
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Lunar New Year, 1988
by Jenny Xie
Doors plastered with red paper cutouts
so that the oncoming year passes these houses by.
Sweep out the insistent winter.
Make what you will out of ritual—
the relative with the steadiest hands cuts the hair of her cousins.
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Grain alcohol in a thimble glass.
The wife bleaches out the urine smell from the bathroom tile
while suffering the clean cuts of an insult.
And the husband?
He’s out in the yard sucking on his cigarettes
and pondering prime numbers.
This year, a cluster of buildings in Hefei grew more buildings.
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Everyone is pleased by a story of plenty.
The husband and the brother-in-law remove every item from the refrigerator
and arrange it all on the old card table for a Kodak photo.
It’s the first point-and-shoot in the neighborhood.
The iron-rich spinach and clementines loose in their skins.
One bottle of artificial mango drink for show.
How quickly a photograph can erase all labor.
It says: we are sated, but the watercress and the pork are unending.
Frugality and daily rationing cropped out.
The camera neuters the present, so what becomes past cannot breed.
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Envelopes arrive from a university overseas,
a new life activated.
The husband will go first.
He purchases the family’s only suitcase.
Already he knows when he boards the plane
this city will appear small, as will his life.
His clothing, moreover, will mark him
as someone who had to earn his way.
Even what hasn’t yet cracked into being
can at any time exert its pull.
The whole neighborhood emerges at dusk.
Wakefulness drawn from the red applause
of firecrackers.
In the alleyway of my childhood home,
you can see I’m covering my ears.
At my back:
the years ahead, strangely lit.
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Winter Night
by Bai Juyi
My house is poor; those that I love have left me;
My body sick; I cannot join the feast.
There is not a living soul before my eyes
As I lie alone locked in my cottage room.
My broken lamp burns with a feeble flame;
My tattered curtains are crooked and do not meet.
“Tsek, tsek” on the door-step and window-sill
Again I hear the new snow fall.
As I grow older, gradually I sleep less;
I wake at midnight and sit up straight in bed.
If I had not learned the “art of sitting and forgetting,”
How could I bear this utter loneliness?
Stiff and stark my body cleaves to the earth;
Unimpeded my soul yields to Change.
So has it been for four hateful years,
Through one thousand and three hundred nights!
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(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)