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The city where love is in the air
By Yao Minji |
April 13, 2011, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
WITH a romantic history prevalent in ancient legends, Hangzhou is the ideal destination for many Chinese couples to tie the knot. Yao Minji discovers how some of the city's high-end hotels are making wedding days all the more special.
As the arrival of spring warms up the city of Hangzhou, Sally Yang and her fiancé are about to complete the romantic task of urban legend - to walk around the entire West Lake (which usually takes more than four hours) without letting go of each other's hands for one moment.
The legend says that the couple who complete this task can expect to live together happily ever after. And this is only one of the many legends that have existed and been carried on in Hangzhou over the years.
The city, known as the "capital of love," is also linked to two famous romantic tales from ancient China - "The Legend of the White Snake" and "The Butterfly Lovers," the latter often referred to as China's "Romeo and Juliet."
The first legend tells of how a young scholar meets a woman at the Broken Bridge, which still stands on the West Lake, and unaware that she is a snake in human form, he falls in love with her. The bond between a human and a snake violates the heavenly laws and so the snake-woman is cast into a well under the Leifeng Pagoda by a monk.
"The Butterfly Lovers" tells the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, who are said to have studied together at the Wansong Academy where Zhu attended disguised as a boy, as females were previously discouraged from going to school. They fell in love with each other, but had to break up when Zhu's family decided to marry her to someone else.
Lovers such as Yang and her fiance see Hangzhou as blessed. Such legendary history and tales are strong grounding for the city's flourishing wedding ancillary business, which includes extravagant banquets, romantic wedding photography, delicious sweets and beverages, fairy tale honeymoon packages, glamorous jewelry, among many more products and services designed for that special day.
The great nearby scenery of the West Lake and the Solitude Mountain also adds more romance to ceremonies, especially when the city is so well-equipped with high-end hotels that can incorporate the local beauty.
For example, Wyndham Grand Plaza Royale Hangzhou, situated only one block away from the lake, contains a ballroom with a large terrace extending toward the mountain. In the evenings, the terrace takes on a particularly dreamy appearance when illuminated with the mountain and the lake in the background.
Yang and her fiancé started shopping for wedding services last December, with their date preliminarily scheduled for this year's October Golden Week. However, they had to postpone it until December or next January since all the venues they liked had been sold out on those days.
According to statistics from Zhejiang Wedding Services Industrial Association, about 72,000 couples registered in Hangzhou in 2010, and 78,000 had ceremonies and banquets last year. The city's restaurants and hotels were especially occupied during the October Golden Week, with an estimated 10,000 couples tying the knot.
The association predicts that the number of total banquets will go up by 5 percent in 2011.
To accommodate the booming market, the city now has about 100 registered wedding service agencies, more than 300 related companies and nearly 2,000 freelance wedding ceremony hosts and specialists.
Faced with the huge market, the high-end hotels in Hangzhou are also devoted to fully utilizing their facilities for better and brighter wedding plans, including InterContinental Hangzhou. The hotel is equipped with more than 20 ballrooms of various sizes and all kinds of facilities, to accommodate the increasing variety of needs.
"For a weekend wedding, you usually need to make a reservation at least a year in advance. For some especially great days such as August 8 or other days assigned to be good for weddings on the Chinese lunar calendar, you may need to book two years in advance," Simon Zhou, a wedding planner and specialist from Hangzhou Qianbaihe Wedding Service Agency, told Shanghai Daily.
"Our company helped plan and organize more than 300 weddings last year, and it was particularly occupied on weekends, with sometimes four or five weddings a day."
Mix and match
Zhou's company recently cooperated with Hyatt Regency Hangzhou for its 6th Wedding Fair. Held last month, the fair showcased pioneering ideas, weddings dresses, sweets and jewelry to thousands of visitors.
"It is popular to have an innovative mix and match of traditional Chinese and modern Western procedures at a wedding," Zhou said.
"The young couples, often willing to spend a fortune on their weddings, are no longer satisfied with purely traditional Chinese ceremonies, which tend to be tedious and look earthy. Neither are they or their parents okay with the more simplified and laid-back Western style of buffets and cocktail parties."
Zhou added that the demand for individuality and "to be different from everyone else's wedding" has been increasing continuously, putting a lot of stress on wedding planners in the city to squeeze out all their creativity.
One of the tricks he recently tried at a wedding was to hide the wedding rings under the dish of a randomly selected guest. One of the classic steps in a wedding ceremony is to have the bridesmaid bring the rings to the couple.
In this case, the couple and the host announce "surprisingly" that "the rings are missing" and ask guests to look under their dishes. The one who finds the rings will bring them to the couple, along with his/her blessings.
As the arrival of spring warms up the city of Hangzhou, Sally Yang and her fiancé are about to complete the romantic task of urban legend - to walk around the entire West Lake (which usually takes more than four hours) without letting go of each other's hands for one moment.
The legend says that the couple who complete this task can expect to live together happily ever after. And this is only one of the many legends that have existed and been carried on in Hangzhou over the years.
The city, known as the "capital of love," is also linked to two famous romantic tales from ancient China - "The Legend of the White Snake" and "The Butterfly Lovers," the latter often referred to as China's "Romeo and Juliet."
The first legend tells of how a young scholar meets a woman at the Broken Bridge, which still stands on the West Lake, and unaware that she is a snake in human form, he falls in love with her. The bond between a human and a snake violates the heavenly laws and so the snake-woman is cast into a well under the Leifeng Pagoda by a monk.
"The Butterfly Lovers" tells the story of Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai, who are said to have studied together at the Wansong Academy where Zhu attended disguised as a boy, as females were previously discouraged from going to school. They fell in love with each other, but had to break up when Zhu's family decided to marry her to someone else.
Lovers such as Yang and her fiance see Hangzhou as blessed. Such legendary history and tales are strong grounding for the city's flourishing wedding ancillary business, which includes extravagant banquets, romantic wedding photography, delicious sweets and beverages, fairy tale honeymoon packages, glamorous jewelry, among many more products and services designed for that special day.
The great nearby scenery of the West Lake and the Solitude Mountain also adds more romance to ceremonies, especially when the city is so well-equipped with high-end hotels that can incorporate the local beauty.
For example, Wyndham Grand Plaza Royale Hangzhou, situated only one block away from the lake, contains a ballroom with a large terrace extending toward the mountain. In the evenings, the terrace takes on a particularly dreamy appearance when illuminated with the mountain and the lake in the background.
Yang and her fiancé started shopping for wedding services last December, with their date preliminarily scheduled for this year's October Golden Week. However, they had to postpone it until December or next January since all the venues they liked had been sold out on those days.
According to statistics from Zhejiang Wedding Services Industrial Association, about 72,000 couples registered in Hangzhou in 2010, and 78,000 had ceremonies and banquets last year. The city's restaurants and hotels were especially occupied during the October Golden Week, with an estimated 10,000 couples tying the knot.
The association predicts that the number of total banquets will go up by 5 percent in 2011.
To accommodate the booming market, the city now has about 100 registered wedding service agencies, more than 300 related companies and nearly 2,000 freelance wedding ceremony hosts and specialists.
Faced with the huge market, the high-end hotels in Hangzhou are also devoted to fully utilizing their facilities for better and brighter wedding plans, including InterContinental Hangzhou. The hotel is equipped with more than 20 ballrooms of various sizes and all kinds of facilities, to accommodate the increasing variety of needs.
"For a weekend wedding, you usually need to make a reservation at least a year in advance. For some especially great days such as August 8 or other days assigned to be good for weddings on the Chinese lunar calendar, you may need to book two years in advance," Simon Zhou, a wedding planner and specialist from Hangzhou Qianbaihe Wedding Service Agency, told Shanghai Daily.
"Our company helped plan and organize more than 300 weddings last year, and it was particularly occupied on weekends, with sometimes four or five weddings a day."
Mix and match
Zhou's company recently cooperated with Hyatt Regency Hangzhou for its 6th Wedding Fair. Held last month, the fair showcased pioneering ideas, weddings dresses, sweets and jewelry to thousands of visitors.
"It is popular to have an innovative mix and match of traditional Chinese and modern Western procedures at a wedding," Zhou said.
"The young couples, often willing to spend a fortune on their weddings, are no longer satisfied with purely traditional Chinese ceremonies, which tend to be tedious and look earthy. Neither are they or their parents okay with the more simplified and laid-back Western style of buffets and cocktail parties."
Zhou added that the demand for individuality and "to be different from everyone else's wedding" has been increasing continuously, putting a lot of stress on wedding planners in the city to squeeze out all their creativity.
One of the tricks he recently tried at a wedding was to hide the wedding rings under the dish of a randomly selected guest. One of the classic steps in a wedding ceremony is to have the bridesmaid bring the rings to the couple.
In this case, the couple and the host announce "surprisingly" that "the rings are missing" and ask guests to look under their dishes. The one who finds the rings will bring them to the couple, along with his/her blessings.
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