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)
China
stories are told at wenhousecrafts.com
