福如东海 (fú rú dōng hǎi) — Fortune as Deep as the Eastern Sea · The First Half of the Birthday Wish

In the third scene of the southern play 《荆钗记》 the old scholar Qian Liuxing is keeping his birthday with a little wine and vegetable fare, and his wife decides that this year the cup will not be poured by his sister, as it is every year. Their daughter Yulian is grown now; she should pour, and learn the forms. Yulian sings of white hair and of both parents still safe, and the whole company answers her: 齐祝赞，愿福如东海，寿比南山 — all together, may your fortune be like the Eastern Sea, your years like the Southern Mountain. The Taiwan Ministry of Education's revised dictionary gives this scene as its book-proof for the phrase. It assigns the play to the Ming prince Zhu Quan; other catalogues give it to the Yuan writer Ke Danqiu, which leaves the scene somewhere in the late Yuan or early Ming. The phrase itself is older than the play. In 1177 the court writer Zhou Bida, drafting for Emperor Xiaozong, closed a Daoist birthday service for the retired emperor Gaozong with 福如东海之深.

The construction is a measurement. 福 is the thing measured, 如 sets up the comparison, and 东海 is the ruler — the sea to the east, toward which China's great rivers run. Zhou Bida's sentence says what kind of ruler it is: fortune like the depth of the Eastern Sea, 测之益远, the further you sound it, the farther it goes. The other half of the couplet measures years against a mountain, which is judged by height and by not moving. The sea is judged by depth and by inflow. The later seven-character couplet makes the inflow explicit, 福如东海长流水, the Eastern Sea with its long-flowing water, and a Qing daughter wishing her father fortune 滔滔至, rolling in wave after wave, is saying the same thing with a verb.

The fortune half is also the half that holds still. In the Ming and Qing texts cited on this page, the years half moves around: 寿比南山 in most, 寿如山 in 《西游记》's portrait of the Lord of the East on Fangzhang, 寿比青松 when Hai Rui's daughter speaks. 福如东海 comes through every version unchanged. It is the fixed opening of the elder's birthday sentence, which is why it can be brushed alone and still be recognised at once.

Eight pots of pine set out for Grand Preceptor Pang's birthday in 《三侠五义》, the needles tied into the eight characters 福如东海寿比南山, with ten thousand taels of gold buried in the soil under them. When a court finally has them opened, every pot is empty; the one for 山 holds only an ivory tag reading ill-gotten wealth on one side and duly collected on the other. The Ming palace ordered the same inscription for itself: a Wanli-era palace order to Sichuan for painted fans, kept in Tan Qian's 《枣林杂俎》, lists fifteen 寿比南山福如东海 fans among its patterns, and the Wanli imperial kiln list copied in the Qing treatise 《陶说》 puts 福如东海 on the rim of a dish. In the storyteller's novel 《雍正剑侠图》, the birthday hall hangs 福如东海长流水 and 寿比南山不老松 on either side of the birthday man's portrait.

The phrase points one way, up a generation. The New Year list in 《飞剑记》 keeps it for the old and gives the young other lines; the birthday scenes put it in the mouths of daughters, nephews and households addressing their elders. 福如东海 also leaves out the years themselves. It is the half of the couplet about how good the life is, not how long, so a family that wants both said can hang it with 寿比南山 beside it.