Life in China 2016: A Picture A Day, November 2 – When we were at the zoo on Monday, they had a display of Chinese paper-cut monkey designs; Remember, this is the year of the monkey in the Chinese zodiac. Chinese paper cutting is a folk art that can be traced back at least 1500 years, and is still very popular today. Paper-cuts are used as decorations and given as gifts for special occasions like weddings, birthdays, etc. During Chinese New Year celebrations, the “Fu” symbol, which I wrote about with the bat post a few days ago, is a really popular decoration. Paper-cuts are usually made from red paper, but there are also ones in many colors. Sometimes they are made by folding the paper and cutting it with scissors to get a repetitive design, and sometimes a pattern is laid flat over one or more pieces of paper and they are cut with s small knife. Paper-cuts can be extremely detailed! In China, you can often see various items decorated in ways to represent paper-cuts. In my picture, the upper left and lower right monkey designs are some from the zoo display, the upper right is a sale display from back in February at the Spring Festival Flower Market, and the lower left is a large paper-cut we have hanging in our picture window. Ours has “Fu” in the center (although it is backwards here because we hung it to be read correctly from outside), and the four characters at the top basically say “Peace and safety in the four seasons.”
2016: Year of the Monkey
Life in China: A Picture a Day 2016, January 19 - Feb 8, 2016 will begin the lunar year 4713, and will be the year of the monkey according to the Chinese zodiac. In general, monkeys are considered to be very smart, or “clever,” so people like to have babies in the year of the monkey. If you were born in 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992 or 2004, your Chinese zodiac sign is a monkey! However, it’s not that simple! There is also a system of five elements: gold, wood, water, fire and earth. When this is combined with the 12 year zodiac cycle, each combination occurs only once every 60 years. Babies born in 2016 will be Fire monkeys and will be “ambitious and adventurous, but irritable.”