Abstract: Bridewealth is both a monetary as well as a cultural component of Chinese marriage. The existing research employs two major frames to examine it:the marriage market theory and the gift flow theory.The former attributes the rising price of bridewealth to the imbalance of the gender ratio in the marriage circle, and the latter regards bridewealth as a venue in which property flows intergenerationally. However, neither of them ably facilitates the study of bridewealth as a social process, namely, the negotiating between seniors representing the engaged families to decide the monetary value of an appropriate bridewealth. The fieldwork of this paper focuses on how the "negotiation" is initiated and moves on until both families settle on a descent bridewealth. In the process, both families first refer to the "baseline" price (dahang) in the local place and then claim that their family status entitles them to raise or lower the bridewealth from da hang. The bargaining behaviors of both families and their understanding of each other's behaviors are in strategical alignment with da hang. The strength of da hang, this paper argues, consists not so much in being a monetary indicator of the average bridewealth as in being a moral measurement of the decency of the bargaining families. On the one hand, a bridewealth significantly higher or lower than dahang may signify in the community that those families are breaking the moral sanctions of da hang and thus leads to questioning and even devaluation of their family status.Therefore, the negotiating families must find ways to morally justify the price-ups or-downs. On the other hand, even the most consenting families don't reduce the pricing process into a polite formality. The ultimate ethic code about marriage making lies not so much in mutual understanding of the two families as in their strategies to follow the moral sanctions of da hang despite of a deviating price. The imperatives to follow da hang and the strategical efforts to morally legitimize a "price" fluctuating from itare central to theorize the normative embeddedness of the bridewealth in the community moral fabrication.

Key words: bridewealth, baseline, moral embeddedness, moral sensibility