Spring Festival is the most important festival of the year in Chinese. The New Year is a family reunion, but also wearing new clothes and hats, which is a nostalgia in the hearts of each of us, and it is also a wish for a better tomorrow.
Since January 20th, "Shanghai New Year, Beautiful Life - Exhibition of New Year's Cultural Relics in the Collection of Shanghai Municipal Museum of History" has been officially launched, bringing citizens a New Year party with Shanghai charm and humanistic warmth.
The exhibition is divided into two parts: "Welcome to the New Year" and "New Year's Greeting". In Shanghai and the Jiangnan region, the Spring Festival generally begins with the twenty-fourth day of the lunar month, and the "falling lights" on the eighteenth day of the first lunar month is considered to be the end of the year. The exhibition selects 82 groups of cultural relics from the special collection of the Shanghai Museum of History, which have both traditional customs and traditional New Year activities, and use time to bring together the characteristics of old Shanghai.
When it comes to the New Year, the first thing that comes to mind is the purchase of food and clothing, so the entrance of the exhibition hall is arranged as a "New Year Street", with old photos, time-honored maps, and wrapping paper for long-established shops. Among them, the old big room is a time-honored brand in Shanghai, and the wrapping paper used to package honey cakes at that time was printed with the words "Hehe Double Happiness Honey Cake" in order to please the mouth.
Children like to celebrate the New Year because it allows them to get the "New Year". The custom of "pressing the years" was widely spread in the Ming Dynasty, but it actually appeared as early as the Tang Dynasty. In the early days, the popular "Crushing Money" was not a circulating currency, but a kind of coin-like "Crushing Money" with auspicious words such as "Long Life and Wealth" and "Fulu Shouchang" or apology charms on it. At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, people used red threads to tie copper coins into dragons, tigers, fangsheng, ingots, swords and other shapes to give to children, one is for children to ward off evil spirits, and the other is the pocket money used by the elders to use in the children's New Year.
The exhibition also includes interesting interactive exhibits such as "flipping the calendar", viewing lanterns and guessing lantern riddles, and during the Spring Festival, the Shanghai Libo also arranged social and educational activities such as rabbit lamp DIY and New Year painting making, which made people immerse themselves in the strong taste of the New Year. "Every year, Shanghai Libo holds a folk customs exhibition related to the Spring Festival, hoping that Shanghai citizens can know the living customs of Shanghainese themselves." Qiu Zhengping, deputy director of the Shanghai Museum of History, specifically mentioned the "From Botticelli to Van Gogh: The Collection of the National Gallery of England" being held at the Shanghai Museum, "Speaking of oil painting, although Chinese painted Western paintings relatively late, they began to paint New Year paintings very early. There are many Shanghai primary school field paintings in the exhibition, which are very distinctive, and later derived and developed the month card annual painting. We hope to tell the audience the context of tradition, so that everyone knows that the more classic the national talent. ”
Shanghai New Year, Better Life - Exhibition of New Year's Cultural Relics in the Collection of Shanghai Museum of History
Exhibition time: January 20-February 26, 2023
Exhibition Venue: Shanghai Museum of History (Shanghai Revolutionary History Museum), 325 West Nanjing Road,
Reporter / Liu Yi
Editor / Huang Qianwen
Photo / Zhou Fei
Video / Sheng Yinmin
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