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.
"The Cultural Revolution broke down many taboos and led to more openness and a more liberal attitude towards sex," said Joseph Cheng, a China watcher at City University of Hong Kong.
Today, the Chinese countryside is irreversibly transformed and is catching on to new trends almost as fast as the big cities.
"Eighty percent of the men here go to the cities to work," said Huang Xuefeng, general manager of Zhaode Trading Co.
"They encounter many new ways of thinking, and when they come back, they make the local farmers change, too."
Amid the rustic affection showered on Zhang this weekend, everything was not perfect.
Her 13-year-old daughter from her previous marriage could not attend her wedding and may be gradually slipping out of her life.
"My daughter wants to live with me and my husband, but her mother won't let her," Zhang said. "All we want is a chance to raise her."
Zhang's urge to establish a nuclear family on her own terms could yet collide with surviving Chinese mores.
Although many of the attendants at her wedding approved of transsexual matrimony, they would not welcome it in their own family.
"People here don't really understand what's going on," said He Liying, a woman hugging her 10-year-old daughter Chen Ting as she waited for the bride to appear from her wedding chamber.
"I can kind of accept this kind of marriage, but if my own daughter wanted a sex-change operation, I would definitely oppose it."
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
Michael slides a sequin glove over the pop star’s tarnished legacy, shrouding Michael Jackson’s complications with a conventional biopic that, if you cover your ears, sounds great. Antoine Fuqua’s movie is sanctioned by Jackson’s estate and its producers include the estate’s executors. So it is, by its nature, a narrow, authorized perspective on Jackson. The film ends before the flood of allegations of sexual abuse of children, or Jackson’s own acknowledgment of sleeping alongside kids. Jackson and his estate have long maintained his innocence. In his only criminal trial, in 2005, Jackson was acquitted. Michael doesn’t even subtly nod to these facts.
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
RSS