The wedding tourists

If you’ve walked by the red telephone boxes on Parliament Square, chances are you have seen an Asian couple in full wedding dress posing for a photographer. A strange place to go after a wedding, you might think, but the odds are that they’re not (yet) married — and won’t be for some time. This is, instead, a new Chinese phenomenon: the pre-wedding photo shoot.

Pre-weddings are now as essential to young Chinese couples as honeymoons are to the British. With ever more money to splash, and their sights set on farther horizons, a sweet pose under a blue sky is no longer enough, as it was for my parents. Today’s twentysomethings demand to see what it would be like to be the protagonists in their own global fairy tale: gown, tiara and all. Pre-weddings are popular because they can be staged, edited and shown at the actual wedding.

As the Chinese become more international, you can see them at landmarks all over the world. The Eiffel Tower is for romantics; the stone temples of Bali for the spiritual; the blue painted roofs of Santorini for anyone fashionable. And London, well, that’s for those with refined tastes.

I tracked down Ceng Hao, a wedding photographer based in Putney, and joined him on a shoot last weekend. It meant a 2 a.m. start. After three hours of hair and make-up for the bride and groom, we arrived at Parliament Square as dawn broke. This was the beginning of an eight-hour shoot.

The demands for fantasy and storybook romance mean that these Chinese lovebirds never look for western photographers, who too often value authenticity over perfection. So the photographers in the pre-wedding industry are all Chinese, too. Hao has never studied photography, but his pictures are fit for the most difficult of clients, precisely because he understands their extravagant aesthetic sense.