Twice ToldJingangzuan, 17 January 1933: Sun Yusheng on the Ziwei scroll
- Language
- Chinese
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
Jingangzuan (金剛鑽, printed on its masthead as The Diamond) was a Shanghai tabloid. On page 2 of its issue for 17 January 1933 (中華民國二十二年一月十七日), the serial 滬壖話舊錄 (“Old stories from the Shanghai shore”) by 海上漱石生, the pen name of Sun Yusheng (Sun Jiazhen), continued its recollections of the year’s customs. This is the paragraph on dusting the house before the New Year.
（撣埃塵）各家於送灶之後、皆須洒掃過年、於是撣埃塵爲第一要務、儘有終歲埃塵厚積、至此日始一掃而空者、屋中埃塵既淨、乃俱懸掛字畫、出自名人之[筆?]者固多、而俗不可耐之天官、或衆神圖、亦觸目皆是、其有懸紫微星畫軸者、畫家每繪一石柱、柱上鎖一似狗非狗之獸、或云是獸即天狗星、或云是獸名年、常欲食人、紫微星故鎖繫之、不令至下界肆惡、而使人不逢年患、故過年時懸此最宜、然腹儉如余、殊不知此典出處、且愧無從考證也、（仍未完明日續）
Translation
(Dusting.) After the Kitchen God has been sent off, every family must sweep and clean for the New Year, and dusting comes first. There are houses where a whole year’s dust has piled up and is swept away only on this day. Once the rooms are clean, everyone hangs up calligraphy and paintings. Many are from the brush of famous men, but the vulgar pictures of the Heavenly Official or of the assembled gods are everywhere too. Some families hang a scroll of the Ziwei star. The painter always draws a stone pillar with a beast chained to it that looks like a dog and yet is not a dog. One account makes the beast the Heavenly Dog star. Another gives its name as Nian and says that it is forever wanting to eat people, and that Ziwei keeps it chained so that it cannot go down to the world below and do harm, and people are spared the calamity of the Nian. That is why this is the best picture to hang at the New Year. But my learning is thin: I do not know where this story comes from, and I am ashamed to say I have no way of checking it. (To be continued tomorrow.)
Notes
- Transcription conventions: characters as printed, including the printer’s 、 as the only punctuation; [筆?] marks a smudged character read from context.
- The page is a scan of about 150 ppi from a set uploaded to the Internet Archive (collection jingangzuan-archive); the masthead date and the byline 海上漱石生 are legible on the same page.
- 紫微星 is the Ziwei star, here a god in a picture; 天狗星 is the Heavenly Dog star. 年患 plays on the double sense of 年, the year and the beast: “the calamity of the Nian” and “the year’s troubles”.
- Sun presents the beast’s name as one explanation among two (“some say”), gives no place for the story, and says he cannot trace it. This is the earliest text we found that calls a creature 年.
- Two years later, in the same paper, he told the story as something he had heard from the elders as a child (documents/jingangzuan-1935-02-01.md).