Chinese wedding invitation wording, and eight examples in English and Chinese

Red is the wedding colour — luck, joy, and the colour of the banquet hall, the bride’s qipao and the packets the money arrives in — and gold is what is printed on it. A traditional card is red stock with gold foil or gold ink, sometimes black ink for the long formal lines, and it is red before it is anything else.

Two colours carry the opposite meaning. White and black are the funeral palette: white chrysanthemums, white envelopes for condolence money, black-bordered notices. An all-white card with black type can read to an elderly relative as the wrong kind of announcement entirely, which is a real reaction and not a superstition to argue with. Two smaller cautions follow from the same logic: money at a wedding travels in a red packet and never in a white envelope, and four of anything is avoided where it can be, because 四 and 死 — four and death — sound almost the same.

One detail people get backwards. Red paper with gold or black printing is the tradition; a living person’s name written in red ink is not, and is usually avoided outright. If your design puts the couple’s names in red on a white card, that is the one recolouring worth doing before it prints.

Now the modern half, because the traditional half is not the whole truth. Blush, cream, ivory and dusty-rose suites are everywhere among Chinese families abroad, and they cause no offence at all when something red or gold is unmistakably present — 囍 in gold foil, a red envelope, a red seal, a red band behind the names. Plenty of couples send a Western-looking card to the whole list and a red-and-gold Chinese card to the elders. The workable rule is not a palette but a test: whatever your design, make sure the first thing a traditional relative sees is red or gold, and that nothing in your names is printed in red ink.

Traditionally yes, and it costs you one line. The solar date comes first — 公曆二〇二七年六月十二日, with the day of the week beside it — and the lunar date follows underneath in brackets: （農曆五月初八）, the eighth day of the fifth month. Older relatives may recognise the lunar date first; younger guests book flights on the solar one. Printing both is not redundancy, it is two audiences reading the same card.

The reason the lunar date matters at all is that the day itself is often chosen by it. Many families pick the wedding date from an almanac, or ask someone to select an auspicious day, and the day that comes back is a lunar one — which is how a Chinese wedding ends up on a Tuesday, or two months from the enquiry, or on a date that looks arbitrary until you see the lunar column. If your parents chose the date this way, the lunar date is the reason for the date, and leaving it off the card removes the explanation.

Get the conversion from a calendar rather than from memory. The lunar month has 29 or 30 days and an extra month is inserted every few years, so the offset from the solar date is different every year and the arithmetic is not something to do by hand at midnight. The lunar date printed in the examples below — the eighth day of the fifth month for Saturday 12 June 2027 — was taken from a calendar, not converted in our heads, and yours should be too.

One more line belongs in the same block: the day of the week. A date chosen for auspiciousness may well be a weekday, and a guest who assumes Saturday will book the wrong flight. When you send all this is a separate question, and the answer is the same as for any wedding with travelling guests: when to send wedding invitations sets out the windows, including the save-the-date and the reply deadline.

Usually not. The tea ceremony — 敬茶 — is the rite where the couple serve tea to parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles in order of seniority, and receive a blessing, a red packet or a piece of gold jewellery in return. It happens on the wedding morning, at one or both family homes, and it is a family event rather than a guest event. The banquet card goes to the whole list; the tea ceremony is one room of relatives.

So it travels separately, as example seven does: its own short note, to its own short list, with the hour, the house and what follows it. The one thing that must not happen is the tea-ceremony time reaching the banquet list, because a guest reading nine in the morning on a card for a dinner at seven will either arrive at nine or stop trusting the card.

Modern practice has produced a real exception. Where the whole day happens at one venue — increasingly common for Chinese weddings abroad — the tea ceremony is held there before the banquet, sometimes with the close relatives of both families watching, and then it does belong on something guests can read: a schedule, with its own time and a line saying who is expected. Put it on the day’s running order rather than in the invitation wording, the way a Western invitation keeps the ceremony in the wording and the shuttle times on a details card.

The same rule covers the other family rites. 過大禮, the betrothal gifts; the hair-combing the night before; the bridal fetching in the morning, with its door games and its red packets. All of them are real parts of a Chinese wedding, all of them are family or wedding-party events, and none of them goes in the invitation wording sent to the banquet list.

The wording is text you type, so characters go on the page as characters: the names, the host lines, both banquet times, the venue, a custom section for the schedule. A link also solves the two problems a Chinese banquet card has structurally — it can ask every household how many are coming, and it can hold a map for a restaurant whose English name and Chinese name are not the same name.

Be clear about the limit, because it is a real one. Wedvite’s designs render in 12 languages, and Chinese is not one of them today. That affects the built-in guest-facing labels rather than your wording: the reply step, the dress-code line and the schedule labels come in a supported language, so a Chinese-and-English invitation carries your Chinese wording with a reply step that reads in English. For most mixed lists that is fine — the elders are being handed the link by a son or a daughter anyway. Where it is not fine, the fix is the message that carries the link, written in Chinese, telling them which button means yes. One more mechanical detail: the link’s own address is Latin characters only, so two names written in characters produce an automatic address rather than a couple’s one, and a paid invitation can be renamed from your dashboard.

Check the characters before you pay, not after. A display face built for Latin letters hands the characters to your phone’s own Chinese font, and the two can sit at different weights — which is visible in a second on a phone and invisible in a description. You can design the whole invitation and share it with your first 10 guests before paying anything, which is exactly long enough to send it to a parent and ask whether the characters look right.

What it costs: $89 at list, once, for any number of guests, hosted through your wedding date and at least 90 days after. There is no per-guest charge, which matters more than usual at a banquet — a list that grows from eight tables to twelve after both families have had their say costs the same. Your first language is included; a second language is a small fee, and because Chinese is not yet one of the supported languages there is no second language to buy here — both scripts go into one edition, the way they sit on one printed card. Start from the invitation designs and put your own wording on whichever one your parents will recognise as a wedding invitation.

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