Chinese Marriage Custom

Differences Between Chinese Marriage Custom and Western Marriage Custom

中西方婚俗的差异

Abstract

There are many procedures in Chinese marriage custom. The book propriety and ceremony, which records earliest wedding ceremony, says that marriage includes six etiquettes, namely, proposing, asking the name, asking for fortune, sending betrothal presents to the girl's family, discussing th e date of marriage and meeting the bride. In western marriage, there are four procedures. They are proposal, changing surnames, choosing the day and holding the wedding. As the different reli gions, cultural origins, marriage concepts and geographies, there are many differences existing in the two kinds of marriage customs. In Chinese marriage custom, the matchmaker functions almost all the time and youths have no right to choose and women are not on an equal footing with m en. By contrast, in western marriage custom, the priest functions and the youths have legal right to choose whom they want to marry and men and women are equal. There also exist common t hings in the two sides. They have been maintained for thousands of years. But in recent years (e specially after the founding of modern China), people have tended to discard some of the details and advocate simplified marriage procedures and wedding ceremonies.

Introduction

Marriage is formed in a long historical evolution of the marriage custom in a nation. It is the reg ularity of the activities that restrains people's awareness of marriage and marriage. Marriage custo m’s binding does not depend on the law, and it can not rely on science tests neither, but on the force of habit, traditional culture and national psychology. During the development of human hist ory, the institution of marriage and family system has experienced different processes of developm ent. Human have experienced group marriage, the dual system of marriage and individual marriag e system (monogamy).

As a union of a man and a woman and a family formation stage, marriage includes not only mar riage, but also the preparation phase for the marriage and the performance stage after the festivi ties. It runs through the whole process of life. These customs, as a national symbol and cultural development, plays a very important role in ethnic studies and the history of mankind.

China is a country with an ancient civilization and a long history, and many customs. Among so many customs, there is a particular marriage custom. This custom goes through various and long stages of development from ancient simple wedding ceremony to later complex ceremony, from fe udal marriage custom to the modern free marriage custom. During these courses, people’s ideas a re progressing, though we can not say that their ideas are up to th e top of mankind’s ideas in al l over the world at all over the time because there are still backward ideas existing in many plac es, in many people’s mind and they maybe will still exist for a long time. However, they are up t o the top of mankind’s ideas i n a certain stage of the uninterrupted development of ideas. Greek civilization is the base of western culture. Britain plays an important role in western history and western culture, and of course marriage custom.

Comparing with each other, they are different in many aspects such as in right aspect and in fre edom aspect and there are many reasons that result in these differences such as cultural reason