The classical marriage runs in six rites: the proposal, the request for the bride's name and birth data, divination on the compatibility of the two sets of eight characters, the sending of betrothal gifts, the fixing of the date, and the groom fetching the bride. The ceremony itself centres on bows — to heaven and earth, to the ancestral tablets, to the parents, and to each other. What the classical texts state without embarrassment is the purpose: the Book of Rites says marriage joins two surnames in order to serve the ancestral temple above and continue the line below. The bride is transferred into her husband's lineage, becomes responsible for its ancestors, and will herself be enshrined there rather than with her natal family. The go-between was structurally necessary because the families, not the couple, were the contracting parties. Modern East Asian weddings are overwhelmingly Western or hybrid in form, but the pyebaek in Korea — the bride formally presenting dates and chestnuts to the groom's parents, who throw them back into her skirt for sons — preserves the older logic intact.