Year of the Dog

[mick]

hi fred, i found this at the precious stuff. Laughing all the way to the banquet in Year of the Dog


2006/1/14
By Lucy Hornby SHANGHAI, Reuters



Wu Jun thought he would save some money and hold his wedding in 2005, when prices would be cheaper as Chinese couples avoided the unlucky Year of the Rooster. But wiser heads prevailed.
"I'm not superstitious, but my relatives are," said Wu, a financial sector worker in Shanghai. His family in nearby Zhejiang province is busy calculating the most auspicious day to hold the wedding once the Year of the Dog begins on Jan. 29.

There will be more blushing brides in China this year, after a slump because 2005 was missing a day on the Chinese traditional calendar that led it to be dubbed the "widow year." Banquet halls are booked solid and jewelry demand should rise.

"A lot more people are getting married this year, at least twice as many. Already I hear you can't get reservations for restaurants through to April," said a seamstress surnamed Lei, at the Feng Feng Wedding Dress Shop in downtown Shanghai.

A Chinese wedding for a professional couple can easily cost 100,000 yuan (US$12,000). While rural couples get outfitted with televisions and furniture, city couples have lavish banquets, fancy photo albums in a variety of costumes and increasingly, honeymoons to exotic places.

"There's a taste for simpler dresses at the moment. There are more open thoughts now, as long as one of the dresses is in the red spectrum, pink or anything are all okay," Lei said, sewing the train on a burgundy dress while her boss put sequins on a white, Western-style gown.

Newly-weds buying rings, necklaces and earrings face gold prices at 25-year highs. China's gold jewelry consumption grew by 9 percent in the year to September, according to the World Gold Council, but low per person ownership fuels gold bugs' visions of surging demand if purchases rise.

In the countryside, couples might spend 3,000 to 5,000 yuan on gold jewelry, while a white-collar couple in Shanghai might spend 20,000 yuan, although their taste would run more to diamonds and platinum.

That's good news for Chinese jewelry manufacturers, who in recent years over-expanded to take advantage of high margins and have tried to run down stocks of platinum and diamond-set jewelry, even as the platinum hits 25-year highs, according to Johnson Matthey Plc.

The precious metals refiner estimated in a report late last year that Chinese purchases of platinum for jewelry would fall by 100,000 ounces to 910,000 ounces in 2005.

But while cheaper palladium and white gold -- an alloy of gold with other light metals like silver and palladium -- has gained market share in provincial cities, Shanghai couples are unfazed by higher prices.

"If they are lower income, they buy white gold, but higher income buy platinum," said Zhang Fuqin, a saleswoman at First Asia Jewelry in Shanghai.

"They feel platinum is more authentic."