A weekend in Harbin: Tigers, a Wedding and a city made of ice - Part 3: A big fat Chinese wedding.

Part 1 
Part 2

Day 2: Chinese-German Wedding

Sunday was Toni`s and Jiarui`s big day as they got married. They met during their studies in the States and decided to live in China afterwards, in Jiarui`s home town Harbin. We know Toni from university back in Germany, and as by living in Shenyang being his (geographically) closest friends from that time we were invited.

As the distance from either Germany and the USA to Harbin is pretty far, we were the only "foreigners" at the wedding, besides Toni`s parents and brother, of course. But this didn`t take away the requirement of a huge wedding ball room to celebrate, as at least 150 people from the Chinese side were invited - family, relatives, friends, colleagues, former fellow students. If it`s affordable for the families, Chinese do weddings big time.

And this room had everything - a huge chandelier, big and loud P.A., a stage and even two hired presenters hosting through the ceremony.

The dominating color in Chinese weddings is red, as this is the color of happiness and good luck in China. Almost all typical wedding decorations have this color, in our case even the furniture and walls of the ball room were red to ensure the couple will have a good start.

Food plays an important role in Chinese society, and there`s naturally no exception of this at a wedding. Guests are usually grouped up to eight persons per round table and every table is filled with as much dishes as possible. A lot of them have symbolic meaning. So for example fish is normally served at every wedding, as the character for fish 鱼 (yú) is pronounced the same as the characters 余 (surplus,extra) and 逾 (to exceed, go beyond) and therefore stands for abundance. Also, as the groom is often referred to as dragon and the bride as phoenix, lobster (龙虾, "dragon shrimps" in Chinese) and chicken feet (they represent the phoenix, as it is a bird) are a typical dish. If you don`t have lobster, any ordinary shrimp will do too. There are a lots of other meanings in what and why it is served, but it was my first Chinese wedding until now - I´ll save some of the mysteries for future weddings to be solved.

An ancient Chinese wedding tradition that is hold up till today is a small tea ceremony where the newly-weds offer each others parents tea. The same is done with 白酒 (báijiǔ), the Chinese schnapps, and the couple also drinks wine together with their arms intertwined.

Especially the bride has to change gowns a lot during a wedding, as you might be able to see on the pictures. While she nowadays often first appears in a white dress like western brides, they often change into a 旗袍 qípáo, a traditional Chinese wedding silk gown, for the ceremonies. And mostly change at least one time more for the parties and celebrations after the actual wedding. Unfortunately, we didn`t attend those anymore, as we only had few hours left till our train departed and still haven`t had one glance at the actual city of Harbin....

I´d like to thank Toni and Li Jiarui for the invitation to this wedding and her family for their unbeliavable hospitality. Chinese hospitality, kindness and generosity to guests is legendary, and Li Jiarui and her family were a perfect example. Although we were complete strangers to them in the beginning,they organised an excellent hotel for us to stay for an extremely good price, invited us to several expensive and opulent meals in fancy restaurants and one of her uncles drove us everywhere in his van - what must have been a tremendous sacrifice for him, as he would have loved to join us drinking beer during the meals but as designated driver was unable too....

My best wishes to the Newly-weds. And to the Li family, probably one of the kindest in China.