The thesis deals with the emerging phenomenon of so-called Shanghai Marriage Market, which is held at People’s Park in Shanghai, China. The place is well-known between parents who come here to find suitable partners for their children who have already reached marriageable age. In order to do that, parents have immediately come up with several strategies; the most widespread one is to put advertisements with their daughter’s or son’s personal information on display around the whole park. To cut the time expenses, some of them also prefer to hire a matchmaker or submit required information to a dating agency, which will take care of the rest. One of the goals of this thesis is to describe the marriage market and put it into a larger context. Therefore, the history and changes of marriage forms are mentioned in the beginning, followed by a list of causes which led to the emerging of the Shanghai marriage market. In this section, the impact of the infamous One-Child Policy as well as the so-called 4-2-1 phenomenon are discussed. By mentioning the problematics of shengnü, in western literature known as ‘leftover women’, an another perspective is added into the picture. However, the main aim is to obtain information about the way the marriage advertisements are written, what type of information is considered to be important and how they are connected to not only traditional but also contemporary Chinese culture and environment, how these pieces of information are presented and what kinds of words are used. What’s more, attention is paid to the way the advertisements try to communicate with the reader, how they try to captivate him and how they highlight some information and slightly cover the other ones. The thesis also deals with the tangible aspect of the matter, focusing on the form of the advertisements and their place in space. In order to succeed in answering all this questions, the samples are first collected at the site by following methods of qualitative research and later analysed and interpreted by critical discourse analysis approaches. In the end, the problematics of gender and class is also addressed, aiming to determine the differences between male and female marriage advertisements.