UNMERCIFULLY, The Economist works straight through the Chinese New Year. Most of Hong Kong however, including the office tower in which we keep our bureau, closes for a four-day weekend. So for a change of pace, I worked from home, in a decidedly traditional village, 45 minutes from the main business district. As I had learned a year ago, soon after I moved to greater China, this village is a noisy place to spend the New Year—think gongs and firecrackers, day and night—but also festive, friendly and colourful.

And a punny place too? The punniest place I'd ever imagined? What a difference a year of studying Chinese makes. As it turns out, corny visual puns are the order of the day, or the entire first month, of chūnjié, the spring festival. Nearly every bit of decoration, food and gesture seems to be infected in some way with punnery. I had long thought of myself as being tolerant, when it comes to puns anyway. But this particular form, the heterographic homophone, can quickly turn into something like Chinese water torture [sic].

Start with the orange trees, which are everywhere. Really they're tangerines (or “mandarins”, but let's set that word aside) which is important. They're pretty, standing at nearly every door's threshold and on village corners, short or tall, with straight trunks, waxy green leaves and bursting with bright fruit. I bought one last year, thinking it was in season. I was disappointed at how quickly it died. But I had missed the point. The joke goes like this: tangerines are are 橘, pronounced jú or júzi in Mandarin Chinese. (That accent mark means that the syllable is pronounced with a rising tone.) So it sounds something like jí, which is how you pronounce 吉, which means “good luck”. The sounds are different in Cantonese, the local tongue, but the pun works the same way.

This formula can be applied ad infinitum to explain nearly every visible or edible emblem of this holiday. Chrysanthemums are everywhere and they look fine. That's not the point. They are 菊花, júhuā. Get it? My secret Santa at the office new year party gave me a pair of embroidered fish ornaments, which would've looked cute on a Christmas tree. But their purpose is to be “double fish” or double 魚, shuāngyú, which sounds like 雙餘, which means “double bounty”. This goes on and on.

Chinese is brimming with puns in part because it has so few sounds. There are only 400-some syllables in the first place, which can be intoned in four or five ways each, at a maximum. But that understates the potential for mischief. Most special about the Chinese language to the mind of this rank beginner is that every single syllable is susceptible to semantic interpretation. I believe that my colleague, who thinks that the Chinese could abandon their characters in favour of a phonetic writing system , is missing something important here, but I am happy to leave that heady debate to the experts. (See, for example, “ Protocols of Designing Pun Rebuses: Revisiting the Triple Interface of Image, Morphology, and Phonology ”. I'm on holiday.)

The lion dancers (pictured at the top of this post) sashay to loud musical accompaniment from house to house through the village, stopping to collect lai see, red envelopes with banknotes tucked inside, before devouring a head of romaine lettuce hanging from a bamboo stick. Why romaine? Because that's 生菜, or shēngcài, which sounds something like 生財, which means “making money”.

Speaking of wealth there's a character that shows up everywhere, year round, but especially this week. It's 福, pronounced fú, meaning “wealth” or “good fortune”. But now I'm seeing it turned upside down. There's a ramshackle gambling den on my street whose fú sign has always hung upside down; I thought it had slipped. But they're just playing with 福. Fúdàole, or 福倒了, means literally “fortune upside down”. It also happens to sound just like 福到達, or “fortune has arrived.” (Perversely, the gambling den has righted its sign, just this week, but I guess the same pun works in reverse.) Golden images of bats adorn older doorframes. These could be called 金蝠, jīnfú, which sounds like “golden fortune”, though my Beijinger tutor denies it.

No one offered me a dish of golden fried bat, and I have nothing against romaine lettuce, but it was at the special holiday menu that I had my fill of this wordplay. My local noodle shop had a special sheet of expensive New Year's delicacies to choose from, this week only. A couple of them were even good, but most were perplexing: lots of leafy greens, because “-vegetable” is always going to sound like “-money”, but also the 髮菜, a moss that grows on grassroots and is not very edible at all but does sound like “make money”, and oyster fermented in soya, not for flavour's sake but so that it can be háochĭ, which sounds like characters that mean “well being”. There must have been 30 items on this menu, and only by dint of the crap shoot were any worth eating. (Local friends warned me.)

The pomelo is a good-luck fruit, year round, and if that's because of a pun I don't want to know it. I was not displeased to learn that recent efforts to cross-breed the pomelo with the tangerine—so as to make a “big 橘”, dàjú, or “big luck”—have resulted in such a tough and bland fruit that vendors don't bother selling it. Not even for New Year's.