Soaring costs

Gan said that she loves tailor-designed ceremonies, but they are always ultraexpensive and time-consuming.

"A friend of mine departed for trips to new cities every Friday for six months to shoot video clips that would be shown at her wedding," she said.

Gan said she could only dream of emulating such dedication, but she did not want to hire a budget wedding organizer and have a standardized, template-based ceremony, which could still easily cost up to 100,000 yuan.

A report released last year by wedding service provider Hunliji said couples who tied the knot in 2021 spent an average of 253,000 yuan on their wedding, which was 3.8 times the amount in 2016. However, official data show that in 2021, the average per capita disposable income in China was just 1.5 times higher than in 2016.

Hunliji's report said that last year Shanghai was the most expensive city in which to hold a wedding ceremony, followed by Beijing, Hangzhou and Shenzhen in Guangdong province.

Authorities have launched campaigns to fight the "ugly custom" of paying sky-high "bride prices" as part of wider efforts to curb wedding costs. The rationale, officials have argued, is that affordability issues are holding young people back from marrying.

Data from the NBS show that the marriage rate almost has halved over the past decade. In 2013, there were 9.9 newlyweds for every 1,000 people, and the number slid to 5.2 last year. The Ministry of Civil Affairs said it registered about 6.8 million new marriages last year, a 10 percent drop from 2021.

A survey conducted last year by the consulting agency iiMedia Research suggested that among couples with marriage plans, 56 percent wanted to cap their wedding ceremony expenditure at 100,000 yuan, while less than 10 percent were willing to spend 200,000 yuan-plus to throw a banquet and entertain guests they barely knew.

No regrets

When asked if he regretted the absence of a ceremony to mark his wedding, Xu, the tech worker in Hangzhou, shook his head. After the modest reception dinner had ended, he and his wife went to Yunnan province, where the snow-capped mountains and diverse ethnicity of the plateau region made for a perfect vacation destination.

Against the backdrop of the Yulong Snow Mountain, which soars to more than 5,000 meters, the couple posed for a photo with their hands locked. "Marriage is a lifelong commitment, and I want to celebrate it every day of my life," Xu said, adding that the Yunnan trip was just the beginning.

In the case of Liu, in Shanghai, he and his wife traveled to Beijing for an old-fashioned photo session, which he said was ceremonial.

Some wedding photo services usually apply heavy makeup to the subjects and after a volley of rapid-fire shutter clicks, the couple is asked to select a few photos from hundreds to be edited, Liu said, adding that many people seem to be altered beyond recognition by the editing process.

However, the photographer Liu employed, who used a traditional film camera, only allowed the couple to pose for five photos in the studio, illuminated by bulb flashguns.

It was more expensive than many wedding photo services that use modern techniques.

"Therefore, we needed to be fully prepared before the photographer pressed the button," Liu said. "No heavy makeup, and no photo editing. We were what we were at that very moment."