The earliest Nian beast we could find dates from 1933

For Spring Festival 2009 the news portal china.org.cn told its readers that the festival’s origin “can be traced back thousands of years”, and that one of its most famous legends was the monster Nian.⁸ Encyclopaedia Britannica gives the Nian as a legend of Lunar New Year: a beast that ate people, feared red, noise and fire, and was the reason for red paper on doors, lanterns burning all night and firecrackers.⁸ The oldest text we could find that gives any creature the name Nian was printed in a Shanghai tabloid on 17 January 1933, and its author was not sure of the name.⁷

The tellings we could date

These are the versions we read, by date of the text. The two from the 1990s and 2000s we know only as a journal article quotes them.

The sections below go backwards, from the red robe to the chained dog, then into the older books.

The beggar in the red robe

The 2009 page gives no source for its story.⁹ Ge Yun, writing in the Minjiang University journal in 2013, quotes the same Peach Blossom tale from a 2003 book, Li Yingru’s Chunjie wenhua, down to the grandmother and the red paper.⁹ He sets two other versions beside it. In one, from a 2002 book, the Nian stays deep under the sea and families lock themselves in to eat the New Year’s Eve dinner. In the other, from a 1994 book by Xu Jieshun, the beast is called Xi and a small boy named Nian tells the villagers to hang red cloth and throw bamboo on the fire.¹³¹⁴ Zhu Chunxiang and Tao Zhang trace the Xi beast to a children’s story by Guo Mingzhi published in 1981 and made into a paper-cut film in 1984.¹³

Tao, writing in the Wenhui Bao in 2025, counts many popular books on folk customs in the 1980s that carried much the same Nian story.¹⁴

Cowherds’ whips in the People’s Daily

On 16 February 1980 the People’s Daily printed, on page 4, a short piece by Zhao Cifeng and Kang Xinmin, “The legend and customs of passing the year”.¹² Their Nian has a huge, bloody mouth and comes out on the thirtieth of the twelfth month to eat its way from house to house. One year it runs from two cowherds racing to crack their whips, then from a red garment drying at a door, then from lamplight glaring through a crack. People learn that it fears noise, red and fire. Firecrackers, the authors say, probably grew out of the cowherds’ whips; the peach charms that became couplets were painted red to drive off evil.¹²

The piece names no region where the story was told and no source for it.¹⁵ It has no sea, no beggar and no red robe. Zhu Chunxiang, who went through the Republican-era papers, calls it the common version and finds its traces in many later folk-tale books; Tao gives it a large part in spreading the story.¹⁵ We read it only as database text, since we found no page image, so it is paraphrased here rather than quoted.

A white beast in Hong Kong, 1949

Three decades before that, the Hong Kong edition of the Ta Kung Pao gave the Nian white fur. On 28 January 1949 its supplement page carried a boxed paragraph, “Nianguan kao”, “An inquiry into the year’s pass”, signed Xuren. It opens as “a legend of China”:¹¹

Every thirtieth of the twelfth month it came out, broke open doors and picked the strongest people to eat, until people joined forces and killed these “Nian beasts” off. Later generations named the thirtieth of the twelfth month nian in memory.¹¹ Then the writer turns, as Sun Yusheng had in 1935, to the year-end debts: a Nian that eats people is no story today but plain fact, and a happy festival turns into its opposite once guan, “pass”, is added to the word.¹¹

A children’s page, 31 December 1939

In 1939 the Nian was already in the Shenbao. On the last day of 1939 the Shenbao ran a children’s weekly on page 13, and in it a short piece signed Shen, “The legend of passing the year”.¹⁰

The night became the year’s pass, the piece goes on, and the day after it, having survived, people called the new year. Later they learned to hang up something red, because red was what the Nian feared most.¹⁰ There are no firecrackers and no lamps in it yet, and nothing backs the four thousand years. The passage is transcribed and translated.

The chained dog on the Ziwei scroll

Six years before that, in the oldest text we found, the name Nian was a guess. Sun Yusheng, a Shanghai novelist and newspaperman who wrote as Haishang Shushi Sheng, was serialising his memories of old Shanghai customs in the tabloid Jingangzuan, printed with the English name The Diamond.⁷¹⁶ On 17 January 1933 he reached the New Year cleaning, when families took down a year’s dust and hung pictures, and some of them hung a scroll of the star god Ziwei:⁷

Prints of this kind existed. A Qing print from Foshan titled Ziwei zhengzhao shows the young god riding a beast, with the pillar it was tied to; the Ziwei theme was also printed in Mianzhu and elsewhere, and Zhu illustrates a print dated 1901.¹⁷ The whole 1933 paragraph is transcribed and translated.

On 1 February 1935 Sun came back to the beast on the front page of the same paper, signing himself Shushi.⁶ This time it is not one guess among two. He remembers hearing the elders say, when he was small, that the Nian was an evil beast, “似獅非獅、似狗非狗”, like a lion and not a lion, like a dog and not a dog, that came out at night to eat people, and that it was the beast chained in the Ziwei pictures.⁶ He adds that the story “不見經傳、無從考證”: it is not in the classics and cannot be checked. Most of the column is about the lunar year-end, when debts fell due, and the poor who fear it more than any wild animal; someone tells him the Nian is nothing to fear if you never borrow.⁶ That column is transcribed and translated too.

Sun was born in 1863 or 1864; the Library of Congress record and Zhu give different years.¹⁶ If his memory in 1935 is right, the story was being told by the 1870s. That is our reading of a memory set down some sixty years later, and in 1933 the same man had written that he did not know where the story came from.

Searching the older books

We searched the Kanseki Repository, a full-text collection of about nine thousand pre-modern Chinese books, for 年獸. There were nine hits. Every one is an accident of adjacent characters, such as “a thousand years” followed by “beast”; none is a creature called Nian. The phrase “a beast named Nian” gave nothing, and “the Xi beast” gave nothing.

Others looked before us, with the same result. Ge Yun concludes that the Nian is not recorded in the old books and circulates only by word of mouth.¹ Zhu read through the Song-dynasty Suishi guangji, the Qing Qingjia lu on the customs of Suzhou, and three Republican-era surveys of New Year customs, and found not a word about it.¹

The words themselves point the same way. The Shuowen dictionary defines the character for nian as ripe grain. In the oracle-bone script it combines the signs for grain and for a person, and it came to mean a year from the cycle of the harvest.¹⁸ Xu Fengxian, a historian of astronomy at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, makes the same case in an abstract for the Chinese Astronomical Society’s 2018 meeting: nian has no sense of a beast in the oracle bones or the old texts, and the beast is a children’s story written in modern times.¹⁹ Ge and Zhu both point out that the chu of chuxi, New Year’s Eve, did not first mean “drive out”, so the eve was not named for driving anything away.²⁰

Bamboo in the courtyard fire

What the old books do have is the noise and the fear. The Jingchu suishi ji, Zong Lin’s record of the year’s customs of the Jingchu region, from the Southern Dynasties, opens with New Year’s morning:²

The commentary explains the shansao from a book of marvels, the Shenyi jing: a man-like creature of the western mountains, a foot or so tall with a single foot, unafraid of people, which gave fevers to anyone who crossed it, and which fled in fright when bamboo was thrown on the fire and burst with a bang.²¹ The firecrackers of that time were real bamboo; gunpowder crackers came in around the Tang and Song, and spread widely under the Ming and Qing as a way to drive out sickness at the year’s end.²²²

The same book has families paste a painted cockerel on the door, hang reed ropes over it and plant peach-wood charms beside it, “百鬼畏之”, which the hundred ghosts fear.³ Xiao Fang, a folklorist at Beijing Normal University, follows those charms forward: words were written on them from the Tang and Song, and paper door gods and spring couplets took their place in the Ming.³

So the thing a Nian story explains was already there. There was a creature to be scared off at the New Year, and a bang to do it with. The creature was a one-footed goblin called the shansao, and nobody in these texts calls it Nian.

How the Nian might have started

Zhu Chunxiang, in his survey of the Republican texts, published by The Paper in 2019, takes Sun’s 1933 column as the source of everything after it. In his reading the Nian is what happens when the chained beast of the Ziwei prints meets the year’s pass, the season of debts; once woodblock prints faded out of city homes in the 1930s, later writers had no picture to go by and gave the beast any shape they liked.⁴ Sun’s own 1935 column already joins the two ideas.⁴

Tao Zhang, in 2025, reads the same evidence differently: the Ziwei beast was probably only one early type among Nian stories told aloud for a long time without any authoritative written record, and he points to how much the beast’s shape varies from one telling to the next.⁵ Ge Yun makes a related point: the story went round orally, and it came later than the customs it claims to explain, though he thinks the festival probably did begin partly as a way of driving off beasts and evil.⁵²³ Xiao Fang documents those rites, from the old year-end exorcisms to firecrackers set off to drive out sickness.²³ A page in the Palace Museum’s magazine notices yet another version, in which Ziwei himself comes down to chain the Nian, and compares it with the Guangdong legend of Ziwei and the pixiu beast.¹⁷

None of them offers a text older than 1933.⁷

What would move the date

The earliest text we found is Sun Yusheng’s column on page 2 of Jingangzuan for 17 January 1933, where the Nian turns up in a paragraph about dusting.⁷ Three kinds of find could move that date back: a Ziwei print, older than 1933, that labels its chained beast Nian; a Qing or early Republican gazetteer or newspaper that tells the story; or an earlier column by Sun himself. We read only three issues of the two Shanghai papers, and their scans are too poor for a text search, so the runs have not been ruled out.