What is the focus of horizontal criticism of couplets?
Spring Festival couplets have a long history in China, which first appeared in the Zhou Dynasty. At that time, Spring Festival couplets were called Chuntie and Fu Tao. At the earliest time, people painted Shen Tu and Lei Yu on peach trees to drive away evil spirits. Later, it gradually evolved into the custom of pasting doors, New Year pictures, blessing characters and writing Spring Festival couplets.
The earliest Spring Festival couplets in China came from the Five Dynasties. In the court of Xishu, someone wrote a blessing on a peach symbol. This pair of couplets is our earliest Spring Festival couplets: "The New Year is coming, and the First Festival is going to Changchun".
Until the Song Dynasty, Spring Festival couplets were also called peach symbols, as evidenced by Wang Anshi's famous sentence "Always change new peaches for old symbols". It was not until the end of the Song Dynasty that there was a saying of pasting spring paper. In the Ming Dynasty, it was renamed Spring Festival couplets. After the popularization of the Ming Dynasty, posting Spring Festival couplets became an important custom in the Spring Festival.