This year's combined Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holiday in China, from September 29 to October 6, saw a surge in the number of couples holding wedding ceremonies.

Xu Dong, who received his master's degree this June and now works at a public institution in Xingtai, Hebei Province in north China, told local news platform Hebnews.cn that he had received no fewer than four wedding invitations for the eight-day holiday.

He attended his college classmate's wedding in Tianjin Municipality and gave the couple a 1,001 yuan ($137.2) red envelope, or hongbao, a traditional Chinese token to wish the newlyweds good luck as they embark on this new chapter in life.

As people like Xu are busy attending weddings, Zhang Jianan, a wedding host in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei, hosted six weddings during the eight-day holiday, equivalent to his one-month workload at other times this year.

Most modern Chinese weddings feature a professional wedding host. The host will begin the ceremony with a brief introduction of the bride and groom. The bride and groom are then invited to the stage to exchange vows and rings.

Ma Ning, a wedding host in Guilin in Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, south China, told financial and securities newspaper Securities Times that most newlyweds he worked with during the holiday had booked his services at the beginning of the year and in the first half of the year at the latest.

A booming market 

The increasing number of people holding wedding ceremonies during the holiday has boosted related industries. The wedding industry includes wedding planning services, hotels and restaurants for hosting the banquets, and wedding photography and videography.

Restaurants and hotels that host wedding banquets were in short supply during the holiday.

Ling Ling (pseudonym) and her fiancé in Chaozhou, Guangdong Province in south China, started their October holiday wedding preparations six months before the big day. They had already booked the banquet at a hotel in March, something that turned out to be a wise decision given the hotel's holiday wedding banquet facilities were all booked out soon after.

Like Ling Ling, Xin Hong from Beihai, Guangxi, started his wedding preparation early this year. However, Xin wasn't as fortunate as Ling Ling. When he tried to secure a spot for his wedding's banquet, the most popular hotels had already been fully booked and he eventually had to choose an outdoor venue to host the festivities. 

In addition to the short supply of wedding services, prices have also gone up. Xiao Jia, a bride who had her wedding in her husband's hometown of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province in east China during the holiday, told Securities Times that a professional makeup artist in the city charges 7,000 ($960) to 8,000 yuan ($1,097) for their services and a wedding host charges around the same. Moreover, the wedding planning company she hired charged a fee of over 190,000 yuan ($26,048).

Zhu Keli, the Founding Director of the China Institute of New Economy, told financial newspaper China Times that many people who had initially planned to hold their weddings last year, postponed the ceremonies due to the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting in the surge of October holiday weddings this year. 

He added that hosting the wedding during the long holiday also enabled more friends and relatives to partake. And newlyweds even had the time to go on a short honeymoon following the festivities.

Not just during the holiday but during the whole year, China's wedding market has seen an upbeat trend. According to statistics from the Ministry of Civil Affairs, there were 3.928 million marriage registrations in the first half of the year, a year-on-year increase of 5.25 percent.

In China, couples planning to get married must go to the marriage registration bureau to complete the formalities. Once the certificate is issued, usually on the same day the registration application is filed, the marital union is a fact.

It's worth noting that marriage registrations in China have been on a continuous decline in the past nine years, reaching a record low since 1986 last year with just 6.833 million couples registering.

Experts explained that the increase in the first half of the year is because people who had planned to register in the fourth quarter of last year postponed their registration to the first half of this year.

According to Chinese online search engine Baidu, in May, searches for hotels for hosting wedding banquets increased 285 percent year on year and searches for wedding photography services increased by 126 percent year on year. According to e-commerce platform Meituan, the supply and demand of the marriage industry have experienced a conspicuous recovery this year. The number of shops offering wedding photography services and wedding banquet businesses on the platform continued to increase.

New fads 

In addition to the increasing number of people tying the knot, the ways they choose to celebrate their lifetime milestone have also become more diversified.

The 2023 Young People's Ideal Wedding report released by Houlang Research Institute showed that more than 90 percent of the 1,261 surveyed young people preferred small and intimate weddings, while over 60 percent wanted to have a "relaxing" wedding. Lawns, beaches and small islands proved the three most popular wedding venues among young people.

According to a report by Modern Express, a media outlet in Jiangsu Province, in Nanjing, Jiangsu, the average wedding banquet used to comprise 30 to 40 tables and sometimes even more than 100 tables. Now, most banquets have 20 to 30 tables and sometimes even just ten or so.

Wedding photography tours and hosting weddings at travel destinations have become new ways to celebrate one's nuptials. Dali in Yunnan Province in southwest China and Sanya in Hainan Province in south China are popular destinations for photo shooting tours. According to the Sanya Wedding Tourism Industry Association in September, every year, more than 300,000 newlyweds come to Sanya to take their wedding photos, more than 10,000 couples go there to hold their weddings and more than 200,000 couples spend their honeymoons in the area. The entire industry is valued at over 10 billion yuan ($1.4 billion).

Ya Hui, head of a wedding planning company in Jinan, Shandong Province in east China, told Dazhong Daily that young people, especially those born after 1995, want to have a tailored wedding that stands out. For instance, themed weddings featuring traditional Chinese cultural elements and cartoon characters have become popular in recent years.

In addition to weddings, many young people have chosen to announce their marriages in newspapers. Multiple newspapers have launched such services and charge a price ranging from several hundred to 10,000 yuan ($1,370).

Mu Guangzong, a professor of demography at the Institute of Population Research at Peking University, told Dazhong Daily that young people's growing sense of individuality has enabled them to have a completely different understanding of what a wedding should look and feel like. They are breaking the formalities of traditional weddings and paying more attention to their own preferences when planning the festivities.

(Print Edition Title: Wedding Bells) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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