There are only 40 days left
before entering the Pig Year on 18 February,
and China is reportedly experiencing a big
surge in wedding-related business.
While under the western
influence the white wedding becomes quite
popular in the urban areas, in China’s vast
countryside, traditional wedding in jubilant
red still holds its sway, along with many
time-honoured customs.
When peasant worker Zhu
returned to his home village in Anhui
Province in the central China to get married,
he found himself ill prepared for what he was
going to face. Instead of hiring a fleet of
Mercedes-Benz to take the bride and
her family to the restaurant as he observed
when he attended his friends’ weddings in Nanjing, he was offered a
family cow wearing a red silk flower. When he
arrived at the bride’s home with the cow,
he was greeted by no one, and had been forced
to wait in the freezing cold weather outside
the front door for three hours until her
family was fully satisfied with his sincerity
and patience.
But what fascinated him most
was the way the wedding hall was decorated.
The gifts of money were not placed in red
paper bags but stuck on the wall to help
generating an auspicious atmosphere.
A
money wallpaper wedding in Anhui
On the northern wall of the
hall there was the central deco theme, a
Chinese character for "double
happiness" (喜喜) that is formed by
30 hundred-yuan notes from his father’s
brothers, considered the closest family
members. In the old less affluent days, the
character would be made of coins.
The fifty-yuan notes given by
his mother’s brothers and twenty-yuan notes
from his best friends were displayed on the
sidewalls, all in the form of the double
happiness character.
The traditional wedding
reception taken place at groom’s home is
usually running like a soap opera, which
includes a warm up banquet (暖房酒) on the first day, a formal
banquet (正喜酒) on the second day,
and then on the third day a homecoming
banquet (回门酒) by the visiting
bride’s family. Accordingly, the money deco
must be kept for three days before taken off
from the walls. During this period, family
members would take turns playing mahjong in
the hall throughout the nights to guard their
valuable wallpapers.
As the villagers have tried
their best to preserve their custom, some
people in the modernised metropolitans would
even go further back in time to revive
authentic Chinese culture tradition.
A few days ago in a county
town in Chongqing, a wedding presentation in
a pre-Manchurian style attracted thousands of
onlookers. In the soothing melody by the
ancient bamboo instrument guzhen (古筝), the newlyweds draped in the
authentic
Chinese clothes, han dress (汉服), were led by the wedding
conductor to perform three deep bows to the
heaven and earth (一拜天地), to the parents (二拜父母) and to each other (夫妻对拜). Then the bride cut a few
strands of hair from the groom’s head and
tied them to her own hair to symbolise their
sacred marriage bond (结发夫妻). Finally they
locked each other’s arms to drink wine from
a pair of cups linked by a red thread (交杯酒).
Another couple in Hangzhou,
nevertheless, prefered neither white nor red
but a black wedding, a style that could be
traced back to the very root of the Chinese
culture in the classic Zhou Dynasty, a golden
era keenly recommended by Confucian.
A
Black-dressed Wedding in Hangzhou
While some Chinese find pride
in the formality and substantiality of the
tradition, others secure convenience in the
virtual world created by the latest
technologies. An IT couple in Changchun spent
less than two hours to get 200 wedding
invitations sent by email, which otherwise
would take days, if not weeks, to accomplish.
The exploitation of the modern
high tech does not stop at the invitation
stage. In Jinan the actual wedding reception
at a restaurant was broadcasted online in
real time and the special occasion was
attended electronically by the relatives and
friends all over the world.
As China gradually becomes a
giant meeting place of the past and the
future, the East and the West, you never know
how many other coloured weddings may appear.
(References:
Initial reports by 袁帅,
聂飞,
解璐,
李忠
and other journalists can be found on 新华网,
现代快报
and other Chinese media)
