CHINESE MARRIAGES.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9445, 15 May 1909, Page 3

CHINESE MARRIAGES.

In a t!>'ooh at a banquet given iu b<3 hou-.ur by the Authors Club, Sir William Hait, who lately letired from the charge of the Chinese Customs, a post he had held for mauy years, gave some interesting details on Chinese life. Referring to their marriage easterns he saM ‘‘Chinese marriages, generally speaking, do not require or allow acquaintance, and much less intimacy, beforehand. The parents arrange as to she suitability of the family connection, and the sooth-sayers and matchmakers see that the young people concerned are not born under exposing or conflicting stars. When the auspicious day comes, the bridegroom’s family send a “red chair” to bring home the bride; a male member of her family accompanies the chair to the door, hands over the key there to the bridesmaid, and goes home; the bridesmaid, instead of being a maiden, is the married mother of the largest family in the neighbourhood, and she then opens the door and conducts the bride across the threshold into the house, where the groom meets her, and in the hall they go through the marriage ceremony, which consists chiefly in making their bows together before his ancestors’ tablets, and in paying their respects as bride and groom to the friends present. She then takes hold of his dress and follows him to a room, in which the bridesmaid seats them on a couch, giving them a thread to hold; the bridesmaid then, with a red stick, lifts the bride's opaque veil, and for the first time the newly-married pair see eao' other; she hands them a cup of tea, which they treat similarly, and they are then considered married. The groom leaves the bride then, and rejoins the male guests to feast with them, and afterwards conducts them to the bridal room, to see and criticise the bride. The critics literally pull her to pieces, I am told, and say all they can to force her to show a consciousness of their presence, bat the rule is that she is not to show any sign of knowing they are present, and, in fact, is to keep silence for three days; any breach of this is pronounced proof of bad breeding. These marriages have probably the average amount of happiness; some are successes and others failures. A great Chinese scholar and a high official was one day talking about this to me, and he said our foreign way of letting the young people fall in love and choose, and the Chinese way of first marrying and then making acquaintance, reminded him of two kettles of water; the' first—the foreign—was taken at the boiling point from the fire by marriage, and then grew cooler and cooler, whereas the second—the ..Chinese—was a kettle of cold water pat on the fire by wedlock, and ever afterwards growing warmer and warmer, “so that,” said my friend, “after fifty or sixty years we are madly in love with each other 1” One curious case came to my knowledge in Pekin. A junior of mine had an excellent cook, hut so ugly that no matchmaker had been able to provide a wife, and yet he was, his ugliness, one of the most amiable and lovable of men. At last a girl was found, and rumour said she was just the prettiest of Pekin’s lovely maidens. The day, was fixed; she was brought home; the marriage ceremony was gone through; the groom saw what a treasure he had got, and the}.bride saw what a hideous mate the fates had given her. The groom then left the room to join his male guests, and when he returned with them to present the bride, they found that she had undone a garter x and , with it hung herself to the window-frame —the poor girl was dead, and had evidently committed suicide rather than enter on married life with the man she had just seen for the first time. So, tragedy is sometimes the concomitant of the “cold-water kettle” style of arranging how people are to marry, instead of letting acquaintance, intimacy, and love settle that for the pair themselves and by themselves at boiling point.