Everything old is new again as weddings change
Print Edition
On the first day of 2020, Sun Yi finally received the e-mail she had long been waiting for: The final version of her wedding plan.
The plan, which had gone through nearly 10 revisions, offered the 29-year-old a “new Chinese style” wedding ceremony in March, which she described as being “traditional, but not old-fashioned” and “ritualistic but with style.”
After China’s opening-up in the late 1970s and influenced by Western culture, many Chinese couples living in big cities favored Western-style wedding ceremonies, which they think are more ritualistic and romantic.
However, in recent years, traditional Chinese weddings are back in vogue among the country’s newlyweds, as many of them no longer consider Western-style gowns and vows of “I do” an essential part of the wedding ceremony.
Instead, they now prefer wearing Tang Dynasty-style (618-907) clothes and performing traditional rituals at wedding ceremonies the same way their ancestors did hundreds, even thousands of years ago.
In a traditional Chinese wedding, the couple usually wears red, which symbolizes auspiciousness in the Chinese culture, and the venue of the ceremony is also richly decorated in red.
The couple will perform a three-bow ritual, namely to heaven and earth, to their parents and to each other.
In Lanzhou, capital of northwest China’s Gansu Province, several wedding planning companies are sparing no effort promoting their “Chinese-style wedding packages,” which offer a wide range of choices for wedding plans.
“Chinese-style weddings account for nearly 40 percent of our orders. Customers often need to make reservations six months in advance,” said Zhang.
Wang Zongli, a professor of Northwest Normal University, said: “Wedding ceremonies reflect social and cultural changes. As people’s living standards improve, they go for more individualized choices.”
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