Modern Simplified Malaysia Chinese Wedding Ceremony

I'm a married man. I had my wedding in traditional way but with a lot of simplification. However, both my cousin brother and my cousin sister, they had a even simplified way of wedding ceremony. Both of their wedding ceremony are quite similar as it had been known as modern simplified style. I had colleagues also having the same ceremony. I found a blog explain a traditional Chinese wedding style in Malaysia here. I'm not going to explain on this but I will talk more on the simplified wedding style. This style suitable especially if you have a lot of relatives comes from overseas or outstation and you want to make to as simple yet fulfill the most important part of the wedding.

The bride and groom will book for a hall at the hotel where the wedding dinner take place. They will also request for a hotel room, or most of the time when they book a dinner night at the hotel, the management will provide a room for couple. They usually will choose to upgrade to a larger room (suites or honeymoon suite that comes with a small living room and another private room).

Anyway, following is the agenda:

5:00PM - Arrival of the relatives that will involved in tea ceremony. (light refreshment to be prepared for them)

5:30PM - Tea ceremony start.
* Tea ceremony start with groom sides from the grandparents (if still available) then follow by parents. Then from eldest relatives till youngest.
* After groom side is done, same process follow for the bride sides.
* After that, kids or those younger than the bride and groom to receive ang pow.

6:30PM - Bride back to hotel room for attire change. Groom will continue to receive arrival. Friends (heng tai & chi mui) from bride and groom side will help to serve the people. Parents will also helps along. 
* Heng tai & chi mui will take care of others friends and parents to take care of other relatives arrival/seatings.

7:30PM - Bride and groom will start to prepare for the dinner to start.

After the dinner finished, the event will consider done. However, another event which is the meeting the bride event. Where the heng tai will play some games prepare by the chi mui. Giving ang pow and etc. For this simplified wedding ceremony, the bride and groom can choose to arrange this event on the next morning after the wedding dinner or on the same day of the wedding dinner.

My cousin sister had this event around 2:00PM before the tea ceremony at the hotel room. My colleagues had this event on the next following morning. So it quite depends on the couple to decide. I had another friend that actually skip this bride meeting event.

This simplified usually takes couple of hours. Comparing to the traditional way, you have to wake up at 6:30AM, start preparing and go out from house at 8AM. Then after all the games and tea ceremony, and others tradition, it finish around 3:00PM. It took about 8 hours to complete everything (not include wedding dinner yet) compare to the simplified style only less than 2 hours. If include the games, it will still take less than 4 hours.

Some couple prefer to spend their time for honeymoon after the wedding. Some prefer to play games with heng tai and chi mui. It much depends. You want to spend more ang pow on the traditional style or save the money to go better place for honey moon? I spend around RM7,000 for the traditional style. (car rental, ang pow, gifts, camera men, sam keh mmm (aunty that talks good stuff), buffet foods during tea ceremony, kuih, drinks and lots of other tradition stuff).