Meet China's teen brides...Age 13

Wen, 18, touches the pregnant belly of his 13-year-old wife Jie. They live together in Tangzibian village, Mengla county in Yunnan.

 

Wen and Jie

Thirteen and just married, Jie looks at her wedding picture framed in white. Next to it, incongruously, are stickers from the Pixar movie "Cars."

Jie married her 16-year-old husband three days after they met during the Lunar New Year in 2014. Not long after, she was pregnant.

It sounds like a scene from China's feudal past, when early marriage was customary, especially for girls, but teenage brides and grooms aren't uncommon in some poor and rural parts of the country's hinterland. 

 

 

The reasons are complex -- as economic pressures, shifting social attitudes and changing population dynamics revive a practice that China's Communist leaders had hoped to stamp out.

Photographer Muyi Xiao met Jie and her husband Wen in the southwestern province of Yunnan in 2014.

Jie was the youngest of a number of young Chinese newlyweds she profiled in a tender and fascinating series of images that helped earn 24-year-old Xiao a prestigious photography fellowship with the Magnum Foundation. 

 

...leave a comment, is it right to be married at 13