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Yangliuqing New Year Pictures: The Ultimate Gallery

Mar 8, 2010

A New Year picture (wiki article), is an important and popular Banhua in China. Its original form was a picture of a door god fashioned during the Qin Dynasty. Later, more subjects, such as conventions, carnivals, the Kitchen God, women and babies were included. Customarily, as each Chinese New Year arrives, every family modifies its New Year picture in order to “say goodbye to the Past and welcome the Future”

Although New Year pictures are produced everywhere throughout China, there are four most famous schools: Yangliuqing, Tianjin; Wuqiang, Hebei; Taohuawu, Suzhou, Jiangsu; and Yangjiabu, Weifang, Shandong. They have different features, advantages, and leading positions. Taohuawu and Yangliuqing paintings represent art appreciation of people in the cities; Wuqiang new year pictures arise from rural areas as pure peasant art, and has a strong rustic country flavor.

Here I collected a few sets of Yangliuqing new year pictures. Hope you will like them. If you want know more about new year pictures from Yangliuqing, you may read this great article provided by chinaculture.org here: Yangliuqing New Year Pictures.

A Yangliuqing new year picture company in Tianjin called Wen Sheng Ge (literally means “Art Prosperity Loft”) also have a great collection of yangliuqing new year pictures. Due to copyright issue, I cannot put them here. You can view them at these two webpages: Wenshengge Yangliuqing new year pictures set1 and set2.

Due to high turnover and its single use home decoration purpose, new year pictures are hard to preserve and very few ancient new year pictures can be found nowadays. I have a collection of 7 pictures here. They are all from Qing Dynasty, more than at least 100 year ago:

As an important traditional Chinese culture and valuable intangible culture heritage, Yangliuqing new year pictures have also been featured on postage stamps issued by China Post:

Do you know any great Yangliuqing new year pictures? Please share with us here.



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