The Downton Abbey effect on Chinese pre-wedding photo shoots
Fuelled by popular period drama and superstar Jay Chou's English church wedding, hundreds of middle-class couples a year from China spend thousands being photographed at English beauty spots and historic locales
It could be a scene from British television comedy The Vicar of Dibley. A female rector receives a panicked phone call from her churchwarden to say a bride and groom have swept into their West Country parish church in all their wedding finery but with no priest, choir or organist in sight.
Putting on her dog collar, the Reverend Katrina Scott races down to find, to her bemusement, flash bulbs exploding as an extravagantly dressed young couple from Shanghai pose at the altar of St Mary’s, in Lower Slaughter, for a Chinese photography crew.
“I was worried there had been a mix-up over wedding dates,” Scott says. Instead, her 13th-century Cotswold parish church had been caught in a trend sweeping nouveau-riche China: pre-wedding photo shoots in quintessential English locations.
Hundreds of middle-class Chinese couples fly to Britain each year and pay thousands of pounds a time to hire teams of photographers for shoots in locations such as Oxford, Cambridge, Brighton, York and Cornwall’s Land’s End.
