Twice ToldShenbao, 31 December 1939: 'The legend of passing the year', children's weekly
- Language
- Chinese
- Reading
- transcribed from the page image
- Translation
- ours
- Retrieved
- 24 September 2026
Shenbao (申報) was Shanghai’s oldest daily. Its issue for Sunday 31 December 1939 (中華民國二十八年十二月三十一日, headed “Sunday, December 31, 1939” in English on page 1) carries on page 13 a children’s weekly, 兒童周刊, with a short piece signed 申 addressed to young readers. The first part, transcribed here, tells the Nian story; the rest of the piece turns to present-day customs of red paper and New Year greetings.
據說，在四千多年前的時候，世界上有一種物，名叫年。這種動物很大，性喜冷，在每一年的終了，與第二年開始的那一夜，他就要出來吃人；所以，那時候的人，都是存有懼怕之人，並且沒有一個方法來制阻他的活動。於是在這時，大家就把他當做一個關，就是現在所說的「年關」；又因為逃過了未被年吃掉的緣故，所以就把第二年的第一天，叫做：「新年」。後來人類漸漸的聰明了；想了一個法子，就是在新年的前夕，大家掛了紅色的東西，因為年是最怕紅色，所以這一家倘掛了紅色的東西，年就不敢近了，於是人類得了較安定的生活。
Translation
They say that more than four thousand years ago there was a creature in the world called Nian. It was very big and liked the cold. On the night between the end of one year and the beginning of the next it came out to eat people, so everyone in those days lived in fear, and nobody had any way to stop it. People came to treat that night as a pass to get through, which is what we still call the year’s pass. And because they had got through it without being eaten by the Nian, they called the first day of the next year the new year. Later people grew cleverer and thought of a plan: on New Year’s Eve everyone hung up something red, because red was what the Nian feared most, and if a house had something red hanging on it the Nian dared not come near. After that people lived more safely.
Notes
- Transcription conventions: characters and punctuation as printed. The scan is about 72 ppi at the page’s print size; each character was compared against a zoomed crop, and none was uncertain in the part transcribed.
- The piece is set as a children’s story, next to a serial and a column of “general knowledge” for children, in the 兒童周刊 box of the page.
- This is the earliest telling we found in which the Nian is driven off by red, and the first to give it an age (“more than four thousand years ago”). It has no firecrackers and no lamps yet.
- The figure of four thousand years has no source in the text.