So you’ve found “the one.” Now comes the tricky part—planning the perfect Beijing wedding. We've got everything you need to navigate the big day in China.

The Proposal

“I refused to ‘agree’ to marriage casually,” says Ember Swift. “I deflected his verbal assumptions … with the excuse that Westerners don’t just agree to get married; we need to be formally asked.”

The conversation was dropped. Her boyfriend Guo Jian ended up taking her to his hometown for her first New Year’s celebration with his family. With his huge family (the father has six siblings alone), the atmosphere was crazy and a bit "overwhelming,” she says. Escaping to the kitchen, she started cleaning the huge piles of dishes stacked up in the sink when her boyfriend’s mother came rushing into the kitchen.

Swift assumed his mother was going to shoo her away from the sink as “she rarely let me clean up.” But instead, she took Swift by the arm, blindfolded her, and steered her to the courtyard. Then, she removed the blindfold. In the center of a courtyard decorated with candles and an archway interwoven with twinkling white Christmas lights stood Guo Jian, dressed in formal Chinese clothing with a huge bouquet of 99 white roses (“9” is a Chinese symbol of longevity). He dropped to his knee: “Ni yuanyi bu yuanyi he wo jiehun?”

"He planned it all as a secret over Chinese New Year and got the whole family involved,” recalls Swift. “It was very moving.” In fact—she admits it brought her to tears.

When Tom Fearon proposed to his Chinese girlfriend, he wanted to do it in her language. “I spent time trying to get [the phrase] down pat and be all smooth.” He got down on one knee with a camera, pretending to line up a shot of the moat outside the Forbidden City. “She was saying ‘Take it already!’ and I said “Just a moment, there are people in the picture!”

That ruse gave him enough time to fish the ring out of his pocket, turn to Edwina, and pop the question. But as soon as he uttered the words, her face looked totally confused. “That made me nervous,” admits Fearon.

Turns out, there are two basic ways to pop the question in Chinese—depending if you are male or female. A man will typically say jia gei wo ba (literally, marry to me, why don’t you?), while a woman might say something like ni yuanyi qu wo ma (are you willing to marry me?). And that phrase Fearon was spending days practicing? Turns out he used the female version. But she said yes, says Fearon, and that’s what matters!