竹报平安 (zhú bào píng ān) — The Bamboo Reports All Is Well · News From Home

The bamboo in the story was a few feet tall. In the plant section of the sequel to his Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, written around 850, Duan Chengshi set down a remark of Li Deyu, the Duke of Wei: in the Northern Capital, Taiyuan, only the Tongzi Monastery had bamboo, a single clump, and by tradition the monastery's stewards reported every day that the bamboo was safe. The entry stops there. Nothing happens to the bamboo. The report is the whole event.

In that record the words run 报竹平安: the stewards report the bamboo safe. Taiwan's Ministry of Education dictionary treats this as the source, gives 竹报 as the short form, and lists 平安竹报 and 竹报平安 as other ways of writing it. In 竹报平安, the order used on this page, 竹 stands first and becomes the one speaking: the bamboo reports, and what it reports is 平安, that nothing has gone wrong. 报 is a messenger's verb, sending word back. The Qianlong emperor later set the phrase beside 鹊报喜, the magpie reporting joy, which has the same shape.

From the daily report the phrase passed to letters: the dictionary records 竹报 as standing for a letter that tells the family all is well. In 1131 the Song poet Cheng Ju, at Kuaiji, wrote of a letter from home as word sent straight from the pines and bamboo, and gave it a courier: Yellow Ears, the dog the Book of Jin says carried Lu Ji's letters home in a bamboo tube tied to its neck. The same dictionary adds that the phrase later became a common line for spring couplets, and it found its way into painting. A bamboo-and-magpie painting by the Ming painter Lu Zhi, left without an inscription, was given one by the Qianlong emperor in 1770, opening 竹报平安鹊报喜.

Jinyang had no bamboo, and everyone, past and present, knew it. That is how the Tang historian Liu Zhiji put it in his Shitong, finished in 710, when he doubted a Han story about hundreds of boys riding bamboo hobby-horses to greet a governor of Bingzhou. Jinyang is the old name of Taiyuan. In the Qing, the scholar Yan Ruoqu answered with the Tongzi Monastery's bamboo, reported on every day, and a note in Pu Qilong's annotated Shitong, printed in 1752, draws the conclusion: if the bamboo had to be reported on, it was hard to grow. That is the weight under the phrase. The stewards were not reporting on something common. They were reporting that the one delicate thing in their keeping was still well.

As a gift it is a report, not a wish. 平安 on its own can ask that nothing go wrong; 竹报平安 says that, as of this message, nothing has. Its two homes are the letter between a household and whoever is away, and the spring couplet at the door. The Ming primer 《训蒙骈句》, which teaches children to write paired lines, closes one pair with 好风敲竹报平安, a good wind knocking at the bamboo to report that all is well. For parents and grandparents it is the sentence a family waits to hear from whoever is far from home, written up on the wall where it can be read all year.