When Zhang Lin was carried in a bridal sedan chair down a 300m dirt road to her future husband's home, she was no different from generations of Chinese women before her. Except that until a year ago, Zhang was a man.
Thousands of farmers watched with a mixture of curiosity and disbelief as the 38-year-old bride and her groom Yang Qizheng, four years her junior, celebrated their wedding this weekend deep in China's conservative countryside.
"It's a bit strange," said Liu Guifa, a peasant woman who had come to the village of Fenghuang in southwestern Sichuan province to witness the country's first public wedding of a man turned woman through a sex-change operation.
The sponsors of the elaborate and costly ceremony, Zhaode Trading Co, based in the provincial capital of Chengdu 80km away, had hoped for sunshine.
Instead, they got pouring rain, turning the unpaved roads into pools of gray mud, sticking in large lumps to the pants of the guests squeezed into the narrow courtyard where the wedding ceremony was to take place.
The weather did not prevent journalists and cameramen from as far away as Shanghai from attending an event that has seized the imagination of a public awed by the frantic pace of social change.
"I'm so happy," said Zhang, dressed in a white Western-style wedding gown and beaming with marital bliss. "People care for me."
A boisterous mood greeted Zhang, the owner of a hair-dressing salon in nearby Shuangliu city, on her arrival at her new home.
As the sedan chair appeared in the distance, the crowd emitted a deafening roar, knocked over stools prepared for the wedding banquet and trampled each other's shoes into the mud in a desperate stampede to see the celebrity bride.
"Please make room," shouted an exasperated manager from Zhaode Trading Co, his white shirt in silhouette against a banner advertising electrical machinery sold by the company. "Show some respect for the newly-weds."
Respect was sadly lacking a year ago when Zhang decided to become a woman so she could marry Yang.
And even though the government gave its green light to the marriage, acceptance came only grudgingly from a society steeped in Confucian values about family and sex.
"In the beginning, when I wanted the sex-change operation, people didn't understand," said Zhang, only her voice betraying her former sex.
"They said all kinds of things, asked me why I didn't want to remain a man, called me a weirdo."
For Zhang, the road to her countryside wedding was a difficult one, even though from her earliest years she felt that she was a woman at heart.
"When I was a child, I liked to dress in girls' clothes and put on make-up. I liked to do girl things," she said. "My parents didn't approve and wanted me to change. But I simply couldn't."
Pressured by her family and surrounding society, Zhang tried to live up to the ideal of a Chinese man, even marrying a woman in an awkward and ultimately vain effort to fit in with social mores.
The fact that, for all the taunts she has had to endure, Zhang can now live out her dreams reflects just how much China has changed, observers said.
The roots of these changes stretch back even before the reform era, to the early years of Communist rule and the ultra-radical Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1976, when millennia-old norms were smashed and some never restored.
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