There was a tidal wave of marriage registrations in China on Friday due to the romantic way the date sounds when spoken.
Jan 3, 2014 is expressed in Chinese as 1413. This date sounds phonetically similar (at a stretch) to ‘love you for a lifetime’ (yi sheng yi shi).
The number of marriage registrations in Beijing's Haidian district was at 309 by 4am, the number is usually between 100 and 200. Shanghai's Yangpu district also had a sharp increase in registrations as the number of couples getting married tripled compared to regular figures.
One couple held a wedding ceremony in October but chose not to register until Friday. "We decided to wait for the special date to do the registration," Chen said.
January 4 last year (1314) also saw a similar trend due to the perceived luck of the date. New years day this year (1411) was also particularly popular as the date sounds like ‘an appointment for a lifetime’. In Shanghai 1,330 couples got married on January 1 2014, up from 800 in 2013.
Last year, three of the nearly 7,300 couples in Shanghai who got married on Jan 4, 2013, divorced within two weeks of their registration. One couple who married on the ‘love you for a lifetime’ day divorced after only four days of marriage.
[Image via ecns]
0 User Comments