Gerong Phuntsok and Dawa Drolma have been pronounced the “most blessed bride and groom in the entire country” by China’s state news agency.

The woman is wearing crimson lipstick under the wide-brimmed shelter of an Audrey Hepburn hat. The reflection of a similarly chiselled companion can be seen in her dark, oversize sunglasses, and his easy confidence telegraphs a coveted quality in contemporary China: rarefied urban cool. The young, striking pair are sipping cups of Starbucks coffee—but, had the image merely been part of an advertising campaign, it wouldn’t, in all likelihood, have conquered social media to become China’s top trending item.

In a country where wedding photography is a ritualized preamble to middle-class matrimony—as well as the last refuge of adult fantasy—a little ridiculousness is practically mandatory. Wedding photos often require a cornucopia of performative props. When this millennial couple are not drinking overpriced coffee, they drape themselves across the interior of a helicopter (rented), ride in a Lamborghini (borrowed), and strut about, chins raised, in pinstripe suits (holding something so risibly quaint that it has come back in vogue: hardcover books). In one pastoral take, the pair sport spectacularly colorful robes against the backdrop of the Jokhang Temple. It takes a moment for the casual viewer to realize that this is not simply another imaginative costume change but a display of cultural and ethnic heritage. The newlyweds are beautiful and urbane; they are also Tibetan.

Gerong Phuntsok and Dawa Drolma, the most visible couple on the Chinese Internet this month, live in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, which shares a border with Tibet. Drolma, the twenty-seven-year-old bride-to-be, posted their stylish snaps on April 11th. In less than four hours, the album had been shared more than a hundred thousand times. By the third day, the photos were being circulated by eighty per cent of users on China’s most popular messaging app, WeChat. When Xinhua, the state news agency, picked up on the sensational spread, it pronounced Phuntsok and Drolma the “most blessed bride and groom in the entire country”—with mouse clicks and thumb taps, evidently, constituting a form of modern benediction.

The couple’s comeliness is incontestably part of their viral appeal. But, as thousands of online commenters, news outlets, and the couple themselves acknowledge, the interest in their album is due in large part to the novelty of the idea that Tibetans can comfortably inhabit such disparate worlds. Indeed, interspersed among the Hollywood glamour shots are images of Phuntsok and Drolma prostrating themselves in front of the Budala Palace, wearing beads and braids and shearling jackets. With implements that their grandparents would once have used, they fetch water, serve each other butter tea, pray, and feed livestock. When asked by reporters to comment on why their photos have become such a phenomenon, Phuntsok mused that he and Drolma may represent the thousands of young people from ethnic minorities who have left their hometowns to pursue a “cosmopolitan life.” “Some chose to return to tradition after feeling a void in the heart,” he said. “As we fight for our dreams, some of us get lost. So we wanted to say with the photos: stick to your beliefs.”

But what should those beliefs be in a world rife with contradictions: between rooted traditions and economic necessity, individual desire and community imperative, the world where you grew up and the world where you might hope to grow old? Since the mid-nineties, ambitious Tibetan youths from the hinterlands have been migrating to boomtown hubs within China such as Chengdu, Beijing, and Shanghai. And few Tibetans—no matter where they live—remain immune to the economic pressures and political dictates that impinge on their marginalized way of life. Fewer still escape the cultural encroachment of ethnic Han entrepreneurs and the market economy. The regional capital of Lhasa, a holy city, has been transformed into a consumerist mecca. Tens of thousands of visitors arrive annually, not for pilgrimages but for escapist vacations.

The perception among many urban Chinese, bolstered by government propaganda, has been that Tibetans are a primitive people in need of rescue. Ever since the Communists ostensibly liberated Tibet from Western imperialists and repurposed the region as another Chinese province, Tibet has been regarded as an impoverished backwater enfeebled by feudal bondage. During the most-watched program on Chinese television, the annual lunar-festival variety show, Tibetan performers were often perfunctorily trotted out in their traditional garb in a token celebration of ethnic harmony. Their appearance had the reverse effect, of breeding estrangement and falsity, the idea that they were truly “the other.”

Phuntsok and Drolma’s album—comprised of eighty-eight photos taken in Lhasa, Chengdu, and Thailand—seems to abolish this idea of “the other.” Tibetans, the photos suggest, are just like us! Yet, like paparazzi snaps, very few of the pictures allude to the actual, lived experience of thriving, or merely surviving, in an alienating city. None were shot near the couple’s actual home, or, as it were, tell their story. Phuntsok is a thirty-one-year-old college graduate with a respectable position in advertising; he is solidly part of the rising white-collar class. While his profession might go some way toward explain his ability to create a glossy spread, his salary hardly accommodates shopping sprees at Ferragamo. His wife, Dolma, is the daughter of a family in the mountainous county of Maerkang. After studying singing in her home town and meeting Phuntsok, she moved to Chengdu, where she found a job at a shopping Web site selling handmade ornaments, a position that presumably does not require pinstripe suits on a daily basis. Rather than being on a luxury honeymoon, Phuntsok was on a trip for his company when the Thailand photos—which show the couple in azure waters, inches from a speedboat—were taken. Likewise, the romantic scenes of their traditional Tibetan life were cinematic and elaborately staged productions. Of course, we don’t live that way anymore, Phuntsok has admitted.

Wedding albums are an inherently airbrushed genre, not documentaries. But Phuntsok’s adeptness at the craft speaks to the way in which he and Drolma have, perhaps, become more assimilated than they think, flawlessly adopting the signature affect of city slickers: conspicuous consumption. It is an affect ritualized into performance, like the performances enacted every day in Chinese TV commercials and Internet promotions, and on highway billboards, where affluence is equated with influence and artifice earns cultural currency. The most troubling part of the viral success of the photos is the way in which they inadvertently peddle the idea of an easy sympathy between cosmopolitan opulence and the complicated business of preserving a distinct ethnic identity. Drolma posted her pictures on the same day a forty-seven-year-old Tibetan nun burned herself to death, the hundred and thirty-eighth to do so in the past five years, and a fact that noticeably didn’t gain much traction on social media.

Phuntsok and Drolma did not elect to be the symbolic vision of young, promising Tibetans everywhere, but the speed with which they became spokespeople says something about a China where optics supersede sustained scrutiny. Indeed, even the overwhelmingly positive online reaction to their exhibition reveals ignorance and deeply ingrained bigotry. “The girl is pretty, but the Tibetan dark skin detracts from her beauty,” a college student from Xian wrote, while an account executive in Changsha proclaimed that “a few rich Tibetans hardly means the whole lot is sophisticated.”

A photo taken against the iconic backdrop of the Potala Palace received the refrain repeated most often: the hashtag #TibetIstheNewestWeddingHotspot!, followed by some version of the questions “Who is their photographer and how much does he charge?” As it turns out, the young man who took the photos did so for free. He is a childhood friend of Phuntsok, and his name is He Di; he, too, left for the big city at an early age. “If we didn’t leave our home town to pursue our dreams, what would our life be?” he told a Xinhua reporter earlier this month. “Does anyone know where I can find this man?” a young woman from Chongqing queried, beneath the article. “I want my wedding to look exactly like this. These pictures. They are worthy of worship.”