Spring Festival Couplet Generator (春联生成器)

Spring Festival couplets: two lines, a banner, and a rule about the last character

Spring Festival couplets (春联, chūn lián) are pasted either side of a door at the Lunar New Year. A set has three parts: a horizontal banner (横批) above the door and two vertical lines read top to bottom, the upper line (上联) and the lower line (下联). They grew out of peach-wood charms hung on doors (桃符). The couplet often cited as the earliest comes from the court of 孟昶, ruler of Later Shu, on the New Year's Eve that fell, by our reckoning, on 4 February 965 (Julian calendar); whether 孟昶 or his scholar 辛寅逊 wrote it is disputed.

Six rules, and two ways to judge the tones

The Chinese Couplet Society's current 《联律通则》 (in force since 1 January 2024, when the 2008 version was withdrawn) lists six basic rules: equal length (字句对等), matching parts of speech (词性对品), matching structure (结构对应), matching rhythm (节律对拍), opposed tones (声调对立: the upper line ends on an oblique tone, 仄, and the lower on a level tone, 平) and one theme across both lines (语意关联). Its article 8 lets tones follow either the old rhyme-book sounds (平水声韵) or modern Mandarin, but not both within one couplet.

This tool checks two of those rules on every couplet it holds. All 35 have lines of equal length. Judged by the classical 平水韵 tone classes, 35 end oblique then level; judged by Mandarin readings (the Unicode Unihan database), 33 of 35 do. The other 2 end their upper line on 福, which was an entering tone (入声) and counts as oblique in the rhyme books, but is read fú, a level tone, in Mandarin. The remaining four rules need a reader's judgement, and the tool does not score them.

Until 1 October 2026 the list held 40 entries and the page said all of them followed the rules; on the classical track 33 did. 2 had the upper and lower lines swapped: 生意兴隆通四海 is the upper line and 财源茂盛达三江 the lower, and that pair is now put right; the other also repeated 旧迎新 in the same positions in both lines and was replaced. 5 had both lines ending on a level tone. One of those was lines 2 and 4 of 王安石's quatrain 《元日》, a pair lifted from a poem (摘句对), for which the 通则's article 12 allows some latitude; but they are the poem's rhyming lines, so both end level, and the page had called every entry authorless. Those 5 were removed.

Which side the upper line goes on

This is custom, not one of the six rules: the 通则 says nothing about sides or the banner. The mainland sources we found give one rule: the upper line goes on the side where the banner starts reading. Facing the door, a banner read right to left (the traditional way), or no banner, puts the upper line on the right. When the banner reads left to right, as CCTV News (2025) says most banners now do, the upper line goes on the left: 秦志法, president of the Jiangsu Couplet Research Society, told China News Service in 2016 that it should, and CCTV says it may. The Shenzhen Municipal Archives (2025) give the same rule. This is mainland practice; we found no official statement for Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore or Malaysia. The banner setting above chooses the direction, and the labels and layout follow it, in print too.

These couplets circulate widely with no author we can name, and the tool attributes none. It composes nothing: every entry is an existing traditional text.