Fu (福) is the Chinese character for blessing and good fortune. At Spring Festival it is written on squares of red paper and pasted on doors and windows, often upside down. It also turns up in calligraphy, paper cuts and seals as a wish for a good life.
What fu means
Fu means blessing, good luck and good fortune. The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco describes the blessings it names as taking in everything auspicious. In modern Chinese it often means happiness, while older usage leaned toward the luck a person is blessed with. The paper is red, the color of celebration and protection in Chinese culture, the same idea behind a red string bracelet.
The Five Blessings
The classic list of what fu holds comes from the Hong Fan, or Great Plan, a chapter of the Book of Documents (Shangshu), one of the Confucian classics. Its five blessings, wufu (五福), are long life, wealth, health and peace of mind, love of virtue, and a good end to life.
Translations of the fifth differ. James Legge gave it as "an end crowning the life" and, in a later version, "fulfilling to the end the will (of Heaven)," while the Met and the Asian Art Museum call it a natural or peaceful death. Later writers changed the list too. The Eastern Han scholar Huan Tan named long life, wealth, rank, peace and joy, and many descendants.
Why fu hangs upside down
The custom is a pun. Dao (倒), upside down, sounds like dao (到), to arrive. So "the fu is upside down" sounds like "good fortune has arrived."
Not every fu is turned over, and sources disagree on where the upside-down one belongs. Chinese newspaper explainers, one quoting an expert at the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences, say the front door should carry an upright fu as a formal welcome, and keep the upside-down fu for things that are emptied, such as rubbish bins and water vats. A teacher at the Confucius Institute for Scotland advises the opposite for water tanks and storage, so that the good fortune is not poured away. The next Spring Festival, on February 6, 2027, opens the Year of the Goat.
Bats and the five bats
The Chinese word for bat, fu (蝠), sounds the same as fu for blessing, so the bat became a picture of good fortune. Five bats stand for the Five Blessings. The Met holds an 18th-century woman's ceremonial robe with roundels of five bats circling the character for longevity. A bat painted upside down repeats the pun on dao: blessings have arrived.
Fu Lu Shou, the three star gods
Fu is also a god. Fuxing, the star god of happiness, stands with Luxing, who brings promotion and a better salary, and Shouxing, the god of long life. Together they are called Fulushou. Shouxing is the easiest to spot: an old man with a high brow, a crooked staff and the peach of immortality. Sources differ on which god holds a baby boy. The Asian Art Museum gives the child to Fuxing, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art gives him to Luxing.
