In the Eastern Jin, the custom of putting up Spring Festival couplets at New Year did not yet exist. People merely nailed up two peachwood charms carved with images of the gods Shentu and Yulei outside their doors to ward off evil and calamity, pray for blessings, and avert misfortune.
On New Year's Eve, Chen Caozhi wrote a Spring Festival couplet in the clerical script of the Zhang Qian Stele on two rectangular peachwood boards prepared well beforehand:
"May the new year gather blessings in abundance; may this auspicious festival herald everlasting spring."
He instructed Lai De to incise the characters with a small knife, then fill them with cinnabar and nail these two peachwood couplet boards beside the peachwood charms at the main entrance to the West Tower.
Before midnight, Chen Caozhi represented the West Tower Chen Clan at the ancestral rites in the ancestral hall. The ceremony continued into the early hours of New Year's Day, after which everyone exchanged congratulations and blessings and dispersed.
Early on New Year's morning, Run'er awoke and opened her eyes to find a brand-new little patterned-brocade jacket and skirt laid on the chest ledge beside her bed. A gold neck ring rested on the clothes, hung with a longevity lock and a jade ruyi. The longevity lock was engraved with the four characters "Longevity, peace, and health," while the jade ruyi bore auspicious designs of peaches of immortality, bats, goldfish, and lotus roots-
Beside the little jacket and skirt and the gold neck ring stood, unmistakably, a small konghou harp. It was half the size of the one in Ding Youwei's study next door, but it too had twenty-five strings, with gilded ornamentation and kingfisher-blue decoration, and not the slightest care had been spared in its craftsmanship.
Overjoyed, Run'er wriggled out from