Woodcut picture can be traced back to the Han Dynasty when they were used to ward off evils.

In the Song Dynasty (960 A.D.- 1279 A.D.), people used block printing to produce New Year picture. With block printing, many pictures could be produced at a time and put on sale in the market. Therefore woodcut picture began to prosper. The content changed also, from worshipping of nature and god to luck and happiness to stories from legends and folk customs. The pictures used animals to represent things. For example, bat was stand for luck and magpie represented happiness. Various drawings were adapted, such as folk drawing, traditional patterns, paintings by scholars and officials or even western drawing.

In the Ming and Qing Dynasty, woodcut picture was quite popular and several places became the centers of woodcut pictures, such as Tianjin, Suzhou and Shandong. In the late Qing Dynasty, woodcut pictures gradually declined with the introduction of lithographic printing from the west.