That's rich! Baskets of cash for the bride-to-be

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That's rich! Baskets of cash for the bride-to-be

By Li Qian (Shanghai Daily) 08:17, November 14, 2013

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Eighteen men carried baskets and boxes containing banknotes weighing more than 102 kilograms when two young people from rich families got engaged in the world’s biggest small-commodities trading center in Zhejiang Province.

Inside bamboo baskets was a total of 8,888,888 yuan (US$1.5 million), yesterday’s City Express reported. Eight is considered a lucky number because in Chinese it sounds similar to the word for making a fortune.

The 18 men were just the first of dozens of people who turned up to greet the 26-year-old fiancee at her home in Pujiang County in a fleet of luxury cars led by a Maserati on Tuesday.

The newspaper said her 27-year-old future husband was from the Yiwu City, famous as a manufacturing and trading center for small commodities.

Both families share the same surname Huang and run several businesses.

The fiance’s family is engaged in construction while his future bride’s is involved in toys and textiles.

The two began dating just three months ago after being introduced by friends.

Due to the number of banknotes they needed, the fiance’s family had called the bank two weeks ago to ensure there was enough cash.

The two families had planned on 5 million yuan as gift money but decided on the 8,888,888 figure because of its promise of good fortune, the newspaper reported.

It is a tradition in Yiwu to arrange 18 baskets filled with accessories, bottles of liquor, daily commodities and money.

But as Zhejiang became richer, cash began to play the biggest role.

The fiancee’s brother said that it was common for families in Pujiang to set gift money from hundreds of thousands of yuan up to several million.

Such figures were so common, he said, that the families weren’t worried about any adverse public reaction or robbery en route.

But the huge sum didn’t escape the attention of China’s vast Internet community and the word most often used in comments on the engagement was tuhao, the near equivalent of rich hillbilly in English.

Tu means uncouth and hao means rich.

The word traditionally refers to those rich people who throw their weight around in China’s rural areas, and in recent years people in the ACG (anime, comic and game) circle borrowed it to describe those who spend money in an irrational way.

The term gained credence in September with the launch of Apple’s new gold-colored iPhone, an item much loved by China’s nouveau riche. The color became known as “tuhao gold.”

The word is now often used by members of the online community to refer to people who are rich in money but who lack the refinement to go with it.