"I will be living in China longer than I originally expected, but my fiancee will be coming so I won't be lonely," said Kilybayev, who is getting married this August.

That's what 30-year-old Li Fan was thinking when his fiancee was choosing between an $8,000 1-carat diamond mined from somewhere in Africa and a $700 counterpart grown from a lab in Henan province.

One day in early May, Sun Xiaolong and his fiancee walked into a wedding dress shop in a township in the city of Lu'an in East China's Anhui province.

Earlier this year, a man surnamed Liu in Zhenyuan county, Gansu province, wrote a letter to the local government complaining about unreasonable betrothal money, after his fiancee's parents asked him to pay 288,000 yuan in bride price, not including a car and house.