Many papers have sought to identify SDT characteristics in different populations of the world. It is now apparent that while elements of the European SDT model can be found in East Asia, there is a contested view about the extent to which these features are pervasive, what the drivers are and the apparent trends. In this paper we exploit the large scale marriage and births dataset available for Hong Kong to attempt a systematic analysis of the changes in the relationship between marriage and childbearing in the territory over the past twenty years. In particular, the paper focusses not only on rends in births outside of marriage, but also in the ‘half-way’ concept of prenuptial pregnancy.