The wedding fun continues (Part 1, Part 2)! Today we will wrap up with a few odds and ends about the activities surrounding the wedding day and the wedding night, before we begin to look at marriage in China. I realized this morning that I had almost forgotten an incredibly important part of getting married in China, wedding photos.The name is misleading; they aren’t pictures taken at the wedding, instead they are taken months in advance in clothes you don’t even own. My wife and I experienced this joy/ordeal for ourselves last year in Chengdu. We opted for the cheapest package (I think 2-3,000rmb), which included 3 outfit changes, 2 indoor backdrops and 1 outdoor photo shoot. My Chinese friends have gone with more pricey […]

With so many changes in China over the past 30 years of opening up, it isn’t surprising that weddings have been hugely impacted as well. The result is that in modern China it’s incredibly hard to say what a “typical” wedding includes beyond a large meal and a lot of drinking. So I will describe a wedding I attended last year in Chengdu in order to present some of the interesting twists that now appear in Chinese weddings. I was greeted at the door by the bride and groom who shook my hand before I was passed off to the official gift collectors. These people counted the money given by each guest and then recorded the figure in a book next to my name. Upstairs […]