wordsfu福
said fú
also: 福 · 符 · fulu · fú · fú zì
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One character, printed on a square of red paper and pasted at the entrance, usually turned upside down. Fú means fortune or good luck; it is also the name of a god, one of the trio of star gods Fú, Lù and Shòu, who is often shown as a figure carrying the character. Mounted fu appear at the doors of Chinese homes worldwide at New Year, and the practice runs across every level of income.
citedChinese 福 (fú) 'fortune, good luck'. A different character, 符 (fú), means a tally or talismanic graph and gives fulu (符籙), 'talismanic script'; 籙 (lù) is a registry of priests' memberships and of the skills they are trained in.
Two characters, one romanisation, and a reader has to watch the character rather than the sound. 福 is the New Year fortune-word pasted at a door; 符 is the Taoist talisman-graph that stands behind the Japanese ofuda and the Korean bujeok. No dated first attestation is given here for either; the practice of mounting 福 is dated instead. cited
When
at least since the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) still carried cited
| Period | Song dynasty to the present |
|---|---|
| How the date is known | textual — a dated text describes it |
| Note | Dates the practice of mounting the character, which is what the source dates; not the character's own first use. |
Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.
The story
The custom is old enough to date: mounting the character goes back at least to the Song dynasty, 960 to 1279 CE.
The upside-down part is a pun, and the pun is the mechanism. In nearly all varieties of Chinese the word for upside-down and the word for to arrive are homophones — dào, written 倒 and 到. 'Upside-down fu' therefore sounds all but identical to 'good luck arrives', so pasting the character inverted on a door or doorpost states a wish that prosperity descends on the house.
A second story explains the same thing differently. It puts the origin with the family of a nineteenth-century Qing prince: on a New Year's Eve the prince's servants pasted fu characters through the house as a joke, one illiterate servant put his on upside down, and when the prince was furious another servant saved him by pointing out that the mistake announced prosperity arriving. Two accounts, one practice; the encyclopedia carries both without choosing.
The sound does further work. Bats — 蝠 — are among the most common of Chinese symbols and carry the same sound as fu, which is why textiles and ceramics show bats in flight, sometimes more than a hundred at once. Bran, 麩子, fūzi, is a rarer match.
The other fu is a different trade. In Taoist practice, 符 are instructions to deities and spirits, symbols for exorcism, and recipes for potions and cures, written by priests of the fulu pai. Their illegibility is not a failure: Ge Hong noted in the Baopuzi, by the Eastern Jin dynasty of 317 to 420, that successful use did not depend on the user's being able to read the script, and scholars including James Robson and Gil Raz argue the incomprehensibility is central to the talisman's authority.
The fortune character now has a code point: Unicode 10, in 2017, added a rounded version at U+1F260 🉠 ROUNDED SYMBOL FOR FU.
Not to be confused with
- Fu talisman — if the paper is red, square and shows one large character at a door, it is 福; if it is yellow, vertical and covered in script nobody is expected to read, it is 符
What this is near
What names this one
Each in its own words, from its own page.
Where this came from
- Fu (character) — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Fulu — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Ofuda — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
- Korean shamanism — Wikipedia read 2026-09-16
Elsewhere
Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.