The Hair Combing Ceremony

While you may know about the English tradition for the bride to wear something new, something old, something blue and something old on her wedding day, you may not know about some of the traditions for the Chinese bride.

The Hair Combing Ceremony

Known as 上頭 (sheung dau) which roughly translates to "putting the hair up" is a very important ceremony in a Chinese wedding.

On the eve of the wedding day, at the bride and grooms respective homes, the bride's hairs will be ceremonially combed by a "fortunate lady" and the groom's hair combed by a fortunate man. They are essentially someone who has a good married life with healthy wealthy spouse and sons.

Before the ceremony, the bride / groom will bathe in water with leaves from the pomelo fruit tree. The pomelo leaves (椂柚葉) are said to be lucky and is widely use in other ceremonies and festivals, believed to fight off evils. Note, the pomelo should not be mistaken for the grapefruit. The leaves can sometimes be found in supermarkets in China Towns.

A brand new set of pajamas and underwear will be worn after the bath for the ceremony and to sleep in. For the bride, she will wear that pajamas underneath her Qwa when she leaves the house on the wedding day. Yes that's right, jammies underneath the wedding dress! The Qwa, pronounced as kwa, is the traditional red Chinese wedding dress.

The hair combing ceremony will see the fortunate lady (or man for the groom) say a lucky ryme whilst combing the bride's hair, traditionally there are 10 verses in the full rhyme but in modern times only 3 phrases are commonly remembered and used. The first three verses are always the same:

一梳梳到尾
二梳白發齊眉
三梳兒孫滿地

they roughly translate to:

1 stroke to the end,
2 stroke together till hair turn grey
3 stroke kids aplenty

One version of the full rhyme is as follows:

一梳梳到尾
二梳白發齊眉
三梳兒孫滿地
四梳老爺行好運，出路相逢遇貴人
五梳翁娌和順
六梳夫妻相敬
七梳七姐下凡
八梳八仙來賀壽，寶鴨穿蓮道外游
九梳九子連環樣樣有
十梳夫妻兩老就到白頭

I won't try to translate all that and make a fool of myself. Perhaps you readers can help translate it?

That's it for this post, more coming soon.