Ancient bride pricevsModern, which is more exaggerated?
In China, the traditional custom of bride price has a long history, and over thousands of years, its form and amount have changed. Especially in contemporary rural China, the amount of bride price has reached an alarming high, putting enormous financial pressure on young marriageable men.
In general, areas and families with poor economic conditions have higher requirements for bride price. In eastern Henan, for example, the bride price 15 years ago was between 8,800 and 10,000 yuan, but now it has soared to 188,000 yuan or even 288,000 yuan, not including the cars and properties that the man needs to buy for the woman.
Here, the ** of the car is usually not less than 100,000 yuan, while the house requires at least two floors of residence. Some places even require the purchase of commercial housing in the local county.
Coupled with wedding and other related expenses, an ordinary peasant family may need to prepare nearly 1 million yuan for the marriage of their son. And for an ordinary farmer to earn 1 million yuan, he needs to pay a lot of hard work and go through many hardships.
Still, what they have paid may not guarantee that their sons will marry wives of prominent or highly educated backgrounds. In fact, in most cases, the bride may be from an ordinary rural family, just like the groom, and may not even have completed junior high school.
In ancient times, wedding ceremonies and customs were much more complicated than they are now. The ancients had great respect for traditional etiquette and strictly followed etiquette in everything. At weddings, the ancients followed the tradition of "three books and six rites", of which one of the important links of the "six rites" is the bride price, which is what we now call the bride price.
The bride price is paid by the man to the woman at the wedding. In Chinese history, especially during the Qing Dynasty, the amount of bride price reached its peak. The amount of the bride price may range from a few dozen taels of silver to a few hundred taels or even as high as a thousand taels.
If converted into modern currency, it is equivalent to hundreds of thousands to millions of yuan. However, there was also an important part of ancient marriages that was the dowry. Dowry occupies an extremely important place in ancient weddings.
Often, the woman's family provides a larger dowry than the man's bride price, sometimes twice or more than the bride price. This rule has nothing to do with the financial situation of the woman's family, which must pay a dowry equal to or greater than the bride price when the daughter marries, regardless of whether she is rich or poor.
According to folklore records, the dowry of a wealthy family may be as high as millions, while the average family also needs to prepare a dowry of at least 10,000 yuan.
In old times, if a family could not afford a high dowry or was unwilling to pay the bride price, they might choose to sell their daughter as a concubine to a wealthy family.
However, the status of concubines in ancient times was very low, and if it were not for the so-called "good concubines", their status was even inferior to that of slaves, and they could be bought and sold and insulted by their husbands and wives at will.
Ancient laws and government only protect the status of the wife, and the plot of the concubine bullying the wife depicted in ** is unimaginable in reality. In ancient societies, people of low status could not bully their masters.
Even if the male owner favored the concubine, the laws of the imperial court would not tolerate such behavior. During the Qing Dynasty, the dowry system was a heavy burden for many families.
At that time, families who had daughters often found it difficult because they needed to prepare a dowry for their daughters. At that time, there was a term for "money-losers" to describe girls, a term that was clearly discriminatory because it implied that girls were a financial burden to the family.
Especially in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangzhou, there is even a saying that "marrying a girl breaks her mother's family", which means that her daughter's marriage may put her birth family into financial difficulties.
In the Shaowu area of Fujian, there is a proverb: "The family of a thousand daughters is empty after being married three times; The family of 100 gold, ten were killed by the banquet. This reflects the economic pressures of marrying into a family during the Qing Dynasty.
The marriage system of the Ming Dynasty was more practical than that of the Qing Dynasty, and the amount of the bride price was relatively small. In the Ming Dynasty, 200,000 yuan was roughly equivalent to more than 100 taels of silver, which was the standard of dowry for the ladies of the official eunuchs.
In other words, if you were in the Ming Dynasty and could afford to give 100 taels of silver as a dowry, you might be able to marry the daughter of the county lord or the chief bookkeeper. Through these historical facts, we can find that there are obvious differences in marriage customs in different eras.
In any case, however, an excessively high bride price can have a negative impact on young people's rights and motivation to pursue love. We should examine whether such a custom is justified and make sure that it does not become an obstacle to young people's pursuit of happiness.