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She was afraid of getting married in front of just a few guests, to the point of barely being able to fill three tables. So he asked the web for help, inviting anyone who wanted to be there to his wedding. The result went beyond all expectations: for the wedding of Xu Chenghong, 24 years old, celebrated today in the Chinese province of Yunnan, thousands of people arrived from all over China, with gifts, food and cars made available for the procession. The influx was such that the wedding was moved to a larger square.
The appeal on social media
The young man, known online as “Xiao Xiao Xu”, lives in Yunfeng Village, Yiliang County, Zhaotong Prefectural City. His father died when he was three years old and his mother remarried two years later: he and his older brother were raised by their grandmother, who also passed away two years later. Ahead of the wedding he had published a short invitation video on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, fearing that there would be very few relatives at the ceremony.
The appeal went viral in a few days. Even before the wedding, thousands of people had reached the area from different parts of China and the surrounding hotels were sold out.
The move to the square and the banquet to be rethought
As the number of guests grew far beyond expectations, the space provided in the village became insufficient and unsafe. Coordinated by the local government, the festival was moved to the square of a town in the nearby village of Luowang, while the authorities also took care of traffic, crowd management and food safety.
The newlyweds received household appliances, kitchen utensils and donations of all kinds, including approximately 1.2 tons of apples and a whole pig for the banquet. A group of professionals and students from a cooking school created a 6.6 meter long cake, while several motorists offered to lend their cars for the wedding procession: among these, according to the newspapers that followed the event, also a Maybach.
To feed the crowd, over one hundred chefs were at the stove, supported by hundreds of volunteers. The traditional table lunch, expanded several times in the previous days, was finally transformed into a buffet to cope with the influx.