In pre-modern China, marriage was less a meeting of two hearts than a contract between two households, and like any serious contract it required paperwork and ceremony. The system that governed it was the "Three Letters and Six Rites" (三书六礼, sān shū liù lǐ), a set of betrothal documents and staged rituals first codified in the "Book of Rites" (礼记, Lǐ Jì) during the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BCE) and observed, with local variation, for more than two millennia. The three letters were the written proof; the six rites were the choreographed steps that turned an inquiry into a wedding. Together they made a union public, ancestral, and legally binding long before the couple ever shared a home.
The Three Letters (San Shu)
The Three Letters (三书, sān shū) were the documentary spine of the marriage. First came the "Letter of Betrothal" (聘书, pìn shū), drawn up when the groom's family formally proposed and the bride's family accepted. It recorded the match and, crucially, the groom's solemn undertaking to take the bride as his wife. In a society where oral promises were fragile, this red-bordered document was the first hard evidence of the contract.
The second was the "Letter of Gift" (礼书, lǐ shū), an itemized ledger of the betrothal presents and the bride price. Its list could be dazzling — a certain Qing-dynasty example from Guangdong enumerates "a pair of golden hairpins, four bolts of silk, two jars of wine, a roasted pig, and silver taels numbered one hundred and eight." The precision mattered: the gift list fixed the social standing of both families and could later be cited in dowry disputes. The third letter, the "Wedding Certificate" (迎书, yíng shū), was the groom's invitation carried to the bride's house on the wedding day itself, declaring his family's welcome of the bride into their lineage.
All three were composed in polished classical Chinese on paper edged in red or gold and stored among the family's important records. In a lawsuit over inheritance or a wife's status, the presence of the three letters was often decisive — they, rather than the couple's affections, were what a magistrate recognized as marriage.
The Six Rites (Liu Li)
The Six Rites (六礼, liù lǐ) were the sequential ceremonies. The first, Nacai (纳采, nà cǎi, "accepting the proposal"), opened with the groom's family sending a matchmaker bearing a live goose; the bird's fidelity made it the perfect opener. The second, Wenming (问名, wèn míng, "asking the name"), requested the bride's full name and the hour of her birth so the families could cast her eight characters (八字, bā zì) and test compatibility.
The third rite, Naji (纳吉, nà jí, "accepting the auspicious"), reported a favorable divination back to the bride's family, effectively sealing the engagement. The fourth, Nazheng (纳征, nà zhēng, "accepting the betrothal gifts"), was the material climax: the groom's family delivered the bride price and the gift list — the ancestor of today's Guo Da Li (过大礼). The fifth, Qingqi (请期, qǐng qī, "requesting the date"), proposed a wedding day calculated from the almanac; etiquette required the groom's family to phrase it as a humble request the bride's family would "grant." The sixth and final rite, Qīnqíng (亲迎, qīn yíng, "personal welcome"), was the groom fetching the bride in person — the only one of the six performed on the wedding day itself.
Each step was irreversible once taken. To break off after Nazheng, for instance, required returning the gifts and could stain a family's reputation for generations. The slow, public escalation was itself the point: it left no doubt, to ancestors or neighbors, that the marriage was sanctioned.
Symbolic Meaning
Every element of the system carried a wish. The goose (雁, yàn) of Nacai symbolized lifelong pairing and orderly conduct. The eight characters checked in Wenming reflected the deep Chinese conviction that cosmic harmony (天时, tiān shí) must align for a union to flourish; a mismatch was not bad luck to be ignored but a warning to be heeded. The careful numbering of gifts — six, eight, nine — encoded the hopes for smoothness, wealth, and longevity discussed in the companion article on weddings.
The whole procedure also enacted Confucian social philosophy. It placed the family above the individual, the elders above the young, and the groom's lineage (which received a new member) in a position of initiating generosity. By routing desire through matchmaker, letters, and rites, the system transformed a private impulse into a public, ancestral event. A marriage was not "between" two people in the modern sense; it was a fusion of two ancestral lines, and the Six Rites were the formal welding.
Regional Variation
Although the Zhou ideal was remarkably stable, practice diverged by region and class. In wealthy Jiangnan merchant families of the Ming and Qing, the gift ledger (礼书) ballooned into a competitive display, with silk, jade, and furniture paraded through the streets. Among northern peasant households, the "six rites" might compress into two or three visits, and the live goose could become a pair of clay or paper birds. Ethnic minority customs ran parallel systems: among the Bai of Yunnan, for instance, a "bride capture" (抢婚, qiǎng hūn) play-ritual replaced the sedate procession, though even there the families later exchanged the formal letters.
Scholars also note a southern-northern split in emphasis. Southerners, especially in Guangdong and Fujian, preserved the full written letters most faithfully — a habit visible today in the elaborate "three letters" still drafted by Hong Kong wedding shops. Northerners tended to emphasize the ceremonial visits and the wedding-day pageantry over the documents. The Qing dynasty's "Five Rites" code (大清通礼) tried to standardize the procedure for the gentry, but village custom always bent the rules to local taste.
The Tradition Today
The 1950 Marriage Law of the People's Republic abolished arranged marriage and with it the legal force of the Three Letters. A marriage now exists only when registered at the civil affairs bureau (民政局, mín zhèng jú). Yet the cultural memory is far from dead. In Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, "condensed Six Rites" packages are sold by wedding planners who stage a symbolic goose-gift, an almanac date-picking, and a grand gift presentation in a single afternoon. The letters reappear as elegant printed keepsakes rather than legal instruments.
Even on the mainland, the logic of the old system echoes in the "betrothal meeting" (订婚, dìng hūn), where both families still exchange gifts and set a date, and in the universal habit of consulting the Tong Shu almanac for an auspicious wedding day. The Three Letters and Six Rites thus survive not as law but as sentiment — a way for modern couples to borrow the dignity and the blessings of a tradition older than the Great Wall.