I am not Yuan Shu

Chapter 308 What a beautiful thing this is!

Yuan Shu dismounted and walked to the front of the wedding carriage, personally asking the bride to get off. Du Ning, who was in the carriage, also got off, still holding a round fan to cover her face, leaving only a pair of eyes exposed.

It was also at this time that Du Ning finally saw the true face of her husband.

To her delight, she found that Yuan Shu's appearance was no different from the image she had imagined in her mind for a long time, and was even better looking than she had imagined.

The hand she stretched out was quickly held by Yuan Shu. She felt that Yuan Shu's hand was a little rough, perhaps due to years of martial arts training. In addition to the roughness, it also felt hot to the touch.

Seeing Du Ning staring at him intently, Yuan Shu said nothing but smiled, took her hand and helped her out of the car, then led her forward, and amid the congratulations of the crowd, they stepped into the General's Mansion, which was decorated with lights and filled with festive atmosphere.

There are many procedures in the wedding, which are no less complicated than the wedding reception procedure, from the initial fanning ceremony, to the later ceremony of sharing the same prison, ceremony of drinking the same cup, to the final ceremony of untying the tassel, tying the hair and holding hands to take an oath.

The fan-rejecting ceremony is that the groom recites a poem and the bride smoothly puts down the fan to reveal her true face.

The Tonglao Ceremony is that the husband and wife share the sacrificial meat of Tailao or Shaolao, each holding a bronze dagger to take food three times, symbolizing the bond of three lives.

The wedding ceremony uses a gilded gourd cup filled with tulip grass bitter wine. The husband and wife each drink from half of the gourd, and then the gourds are spliced together, wrapped with red silk, and hidden in a lacquer box, symbolizing the union of the two.

Untying the tassel and tying the hair knot has a more symbolic meaning. The groom needs to untie the colorful tassel from the bride's hair and tie it with the hair of both parties with a red string and put it in a green silk box, symbolizing the fusion of blood and the two becoming one.

It is worth mentioning that the weddings of Eastern Han nobles did not have the so-called process of bowing to heaven and earth and then to parents, because the weddings in the Eastern Han Dynasty still had ancient customs and focused not only on the union of two individuals or two families, but the most essential thing was the alliance between two families.

During this period, such a grand wedding was usually held between the legitimate sons and daughters of each family. If it was between illegitimate sons and daughters, it would not be possible to hold such a grand wedding.

This can be reflected from the final hand-holding and oath-taking ceremony.

During this stage, it is necessary to engrave the eight characters "Heaven and earth as mirrors, sun and moon as alliances" on a jade sceptre, and then store the jade sceptre in the ancestral temples of the two families as proof of the legitimacy of the marriage.

The importance of the ancestral temple to every family is self-evident. To store the wedding certificate in two ancestral temples means an important union between the two families.

If they betray, they will not be able to hide it even from their ancestors, and will have to endure tremendous patriarchal, social, and moral pressures, which may even trigger a series of chain reactions, causing a credibility crisis for the entire family, and in turn affecting the family's political interests.

From this point of view, Yang Ci's backstabbing had a huge impact on the Yuan family. After all, Yang Biao was the legitimate son of the Yang family, and Yuan Shu's aunt was also the legitimate daughter of the Yuan family. Both families had jade scepters in their respective ancestral temples.

As a result, you, Old Yang, actually stabbed Yuan in the back!

After that, the Yuan family angrily took the Yang family's jade scepter out of the ancestral temple and destroyed it, which in essence was equivalent to no longer recognizing the alliance with the Yang family.

Yang Ci regretted it afterwards, but it was too late.

From that time on, Yang Biao's marriage could be considered a true marriage between two people, but this was not necessarily the result that Yang and Yang Biao wanted. In fact, for them, at this point, it would be better not to get married.

From this moment on, the alliance between the Yuan and Du families was officially formed, and both parties had obligations and responsibilities to each other. This was the direct impact of the marriage brought about by the ancestral covenant.

From this perspective, the impact of this covenant on Yuan Shu and Du Ning is not as great as its impact on the Yuan and Du families, which fully reflects the nature of aristocratic weddings during this period.

It's not even a union of two families, but a union of two clans.

It was not until after the Sui and Tang dynasties that the aristocracy and traditional clan forces of the Middle Ages were wiped out in the raging wars of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, and the dual society of monarchs and commoners in the Song Dynasty stabilized, that the meaning of a wedding became closer to the union of two families.

As for the further development of the meaning of weddings to the stage where they are widely regarded as the union of two individuals, it is a chain reaction after social revolutions and liberation movements. The only thing that is certain is that in the entire human history, love marriages that purely represent the union of two individuals have never been mainstream, which is one of the reasons why Yuan Shu did not care much about this wedding.

But now that things have come to this, he still accepted the outcome calmly.

Looking at the slightly nervous and shy girl in front of him, he just sighed softly, thinking that even if he didn't like her, he would still have to treat her with respect and live in peace in the future.

The formal wedding process has ended at this step. Next, the bride enters the bridal chamber, and the groom needs to stay and entertain the guests with the elders in the family and hold a formal wedding banquet - the Hehuan Banquet.

At the wedding banquet, "Music of the Bedroom" was played according to Zhou rituals, and dancers performed the "Lingxing Dance" while holding feather flutes. Guests drank wedding wine from gold, silver, or lacquer wine glasses, depending on their social status.

The Yuan family held a grand banquet and served all the rare ingredients they could find. Famous chefs collected from all over the Sanhe area worked together to cook a feast to satisfy the guests' greedy stomachs.

Yuan Shu originally wanted to take this opportunity to eat a lot because he was really hungry. However, he never expected that he would be surrounded by a group of subordinates who toasted him with wedding wine one by one and insisted to drink a glass with him to share in the festive atmosphere.

Lu Zhi, Jia Xu, Cheng Li, the Thirteen Guardians, and even Duan Xing and Dong Xuan who were a little drunk, surrounded Yuan Shu like the moon surrounded by stars, as if they would not let you go to the bridal chamber if you don't drink, and would suffocate you to death.

Yuan Shu dodged left and right, using his agile body to try to escape, but with men on both sides, he was no match for four hands with his two fists, and a strong man could not withstand three splashes of liquid. He was forced to drink several glasses of wine without paying attention.

Yuan Feng was very satisfied with the lively scene.

My eldest son is getting married and is really becoming an adult. He will have a baby soon, and he will soon become a grandfather and have grandchildren!
What a beautiful thing this is!

At this moment, Yuan Feng seemed to have forgotten that Yuan Ji had already given him a grandson and two granddaughters.

There was no way. Yuan Feng's preference for Yuan Shu was becoming more and more obvious. In addition, Yuan Ji and Yuan Shao were not in Luoyang all year round, so the closeness of their relationship was obvious at a glance.

Seeing Yuan Feng's pleased look on his face, his confidant, Minister of Agriculture Mao Yang, who was sitting next to him, followed his gaze, feeling a little helpless.

He only felt that the affection between Yuan Feng and Yuan Shu, father and son, was very deep, and their relationship was quite harmonious. Even when it came to the crucial power level, the two had never had any conflicts.

In his opinion, Yuan Shu was a relatively strong person, while Yuan Feng was relatively tolerant. Originally, the political situation in the court was centered on Yuan Feng and assisted by Yuan Shu. However, in quite a few occasions and situations, Yuan Shu's opinions were the ones that were finally implemented, rather than Yuan Feng's opinions.

But Yuan Feng seemed to be happy to see this happen.

He often clearly supported Yuan Shu's opinions and asked his subordinates to implement them.

This once made Yuan Feng's disciples and former officials worried.

In fact, there are quite a lot of close confidants around Yuan Feng. After the mutiny, many of them occupied high positions in the court. They are currently the main force in charge of the government and hold many key executive positions.

Most of Yuan Shu's subordinates held grassroots positions due to their lack of qualifications.

But this is only temporary. As time goes by and Yuan Shu continues to grow, these young people under his command will inevitably rise up and begin to threaten the power status of the old Dengs.

This trend is irreversible.

(End of this chapter)