On June 27 to 28, 2026, the 2026 “Twin River Pearl” China Liaocheng Hanfu Wedding Culture Festival was held in the city’s Water City, an old town area built on canal networks. The two-day festival, organized by Liaocheng’s cultural and tourism authorities in partnership with the wedding industry, distinguished itself from typical hanfu flash events by staging a careful restoration of the Three Books and Six Rites (san shu liu li), the classical Chinese marriage protocol.
The phrase Three Books and Six Rites refers to a set of written agreements and ceremonial procedures that governed formal marriages through much of the imperial period. Liaocheng’s restoration used professional reenactors, classical instrument ensembles, and water-procession choreography to make the protocol legible to a contemporary audience. A wedding sedan chair carried by water wound through blue-brick lanes and the Dongchang Lake shoreline, producing the much-noted “red bridal reflected on water city” tableau.
Beyond the formal wedding, the festival ran a daytime hanfu garment parade and a non-ICH heritage procession through the old town, then transformed the same streets into a “guofeng secret realm” after dark, with ICH craft markets, hands-on workshops, and outdoor costumed performances. Festival organizers described the day-to-night structure as a deliberate stitching together of refined ceremony (ya), energetic daytime show (ran), and lively evening market (nao), and the formula was used to bring the wedding’s classical tone into contact with the kind of festival energy that draws families and young visitors.
A wedding industry forum ran in parallel with the festival, drawing wedding practitioners from across the country. Sessions covered staging real-wedding sample shoots, supplier coordination, and the integration of Liaocheng’s water-town and ICH assets into wedding packages. Liaocheng’s municipal team has framed the forum as a step in a longer plan to position the city as a “wedding destination” rather than a one-off event host.
The festival is part of a broader effort by Liaocheng to align its water-city heritage with the rising demand for what the local government describes as “new Chinese-style romance” weddings. Local planners have indicated that subsequent editions will be staged annually, with the next iteration expected in late June 2027.
Liaocheng’s old town has long hosted commercial wedding photography, and the new festival is being read locally as an attempt to upgrade that base into a higher-end destination-wedding product. Local industry figures pointed to the festival’s combination of a processional water wedding, an outdoor evening bazaar, and a hands-on craft market as the elements that distinguish Liaocheng from other cities that have attempted similar hanfu wedding events in the past two years.
Costume-wise, the festival drew on the Ming and Qing bridal wardrobe, with phoenix crowns (fengugan), embroidered robes (xiapei), and pleated skirts (mamianqun) appearing on participants in the formal procession. Several bridal shops in the old town reported strong interest in festival-style wedding packages, and at least two of the festival’s sample shoots have been published as a promotional package for the city’s commercial wedding industry.