Gift for colleague getting married in China

[tribpot]

Any wise MNetters have any thoughts?

Someone from my team is going to China at the end of next week to get married (to someone he has known for c. 6 weeks but let's skip that part for now!). We want to buy him (them) a wedding present but need it to be something portable because we don't know if they are going to come back to the UK or settle in China.

We did think about photo credits that he could use with photobox, for example, but you can only create them for a particular account, you can't 'give' them.

I gave my best friend a herd of goats through www.worldvision.org.
Partly because the couple have everything and also as I don'yt think the marriage will last.

Not everyone would appreciate this, but my friend loved it.

Eek - we had a charity wedding list for our wedding, wonder if people thought we asked for goats so we wouldn't have to split the assets up later

Anyway, a nice thought though - will put it to the committee!

tribpot I am so impressed you had a charity wedding list!

The couple in question despite having EVERYTHING also had a wedding list at a very upmarket store!

I don't know what my friend's wife thought of the gift - she has never mentioned it to me!

a years subscription to Home & Garden or something - at least it will last the year!

Sorry that was very flippant - im sure they'll be very happy

Is his wife to be Chinese? If so then money is the most commonly given gift usually given in a hong boa or red packet (a fancy red envelope.) They use it to pay for the wedding and rarely give typical western type wedding presents. You have to give the right amount though, even numbers are lucky, odd numbers are not, and anything with a 4 in it is not good (the word for "four" sounds like the word for "death"). Anything with an 8 is really good, and two 8's even better. So 88 quid would be fab. Hope that helps.

Hee hee jampots, my thoughts exactly (Except as she can't speak English perhaps this might seem a bit mean!)

We had a charity list partly because we had too much stuff already and partly because I didn't really want expensive plates or whatever it is people have on their lists.

Of course, turn the clock forward to the first time we have to host Christmas dinner and things like having to serve gravy out of a pyrex jug make you realise that actually asking for expensive dinner bits would have been a good idea!

Thanks for that mrsmalumbas - had thought that acquiring some yuan here might be rather expensive? Btw, am a bit foxed by Chinese currency, my SIL (who lives in China as well) refers to it as RMB?

How about US dollars they have value anywhere in the world?

When itinerant friends of ours got married in Nepal we gave them a lovely photo album (for the wedding pics) as it's small enough to pack but still a bit traditional and wedding-appropriate.

If your colleague isn't Chinese himself I wouldn't go mad trying to get a Chinese-style present - the couple I mentioned above were Welsh Jewish and Australian Chinese and positively revelled in the multicultural variety of their gifts, which ranged from a canteen of cutlery (the Welsh grandma), huge flower arrangements (very fashionable Nepali gift) to the red envelopes of money described below (from the Chinese cousins).

tribpot, think yuan is like the pound, whereas RMB is like GBP, if that makes sense

Thanks again all - colleague is indeed not Chinese (leading one to wonder how they communicate - by text message, apparently) and quite frankly I think a charity gift will do the most good under the circs. Charity it is!

Well, I nobly restrained myself from buying him a toilet in the Third World and went for training a health worker and clean water for 50 people. Some good shall come of all this at least!