Foot binding
Foot binding, or footbinding, was the Chinese custom of breaking and tightly binding the feet of young girls to change their shape and size. Feet altered by foot binding were known as lotus feet and the shoes made for them were known as lotus shoes. In late imperial China, bound feet were considered a status symbol and a mark of feminine beauty. However, foot binding was a painful practice that limited the mobility of women and resulted in lifelong disabilities.
The prevalence and practice of foot binding varied over time, by region, and by social class. The practice may have originated among court dancers during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period in 10th-century China and gradually became popular among the elite during the Song dynasty, later spreading to lower social classes by the Qing dynasty. Manchu emperors attempted to ban the practice in the 17th century but failed. In some areas, foot binding raised marriage prospects. It has been estimated that by the 19th century 40–50% of all Chinese women may have had bound feet, rising to almost 100% among upper-class Han Chinese women. Frontier ethnic groups such as Turkestanis, Manchus, Mongols, and Tibetans generally did not practice footbinding.
While Christian missionaries and Chinese reformers challenged the practice in the late 19th century, it was not until the early 20th century that the practice began to die out, following the efforts of anti-foot binding campaigns. Additionally, upper-class and urban women dropped the practice sooner than poorer rural women. By 2007, only a handful of elderly Chinese women whose feet had been bound were still alive.
History
Origin
There are a number of stories about the origin of foot binding before its establishment during the Song dynasty. One of these accounts is of Pan Yunu, a favourite consort of the Southern Qi Emperor Xiao Baojuan. In the story, Pan Yunu, renowned for having delicate feet, performed a dance barefoot on a floor decorated with the design of a golden lotus. The Emperor, expressing admiration, said that "lotus springs from her every step!", a reference to the Buddhist legend of Padmavati, under whose feet lotus springs forth. This story may have given rise to the terms 'golden lotus' or 'lotus feet' used to describe bound feet; there is no evidence, however, that Consort Pan ever bound her feet.The general view is that the practice is likely to have originated during the reign of the 10th-century Emperor Li Yu of the Southern Tang, just before the Song dynasty. Li Yu created a golden lotus decorated with precious stones and pearls and asked his concubine Yao Niang to bind her feet in white silk into the shape of the crescent moon. She then performed a dance on the points of her bound feet on the lotus. Yao Niang's dance was said to be so graceful that others sought to imitate her. The binding of feet was then replicated by other upper-class women and the practice spread.
Some of the earliest possible references to foot binding appear around 1100, when a couple of poems seemed to allude to the practice. Soon after 1148, in the earliest extant discourse on the practice of foot binding, scholar wrote that a bound foot should be arch shaped and small. He observed that "women's foot binding began in recent times; it was not mentioned in any books from previous eras." In the 13th century, scholar wrote the first known criticism of the practice: "Little girls not yet four or five years old, who have done nothing wrong, nevertheless are made to suffer unlimited pain to bind small. I do not know what use this is."
File:雜劇人物圖.jpg|thumb|Southern Song zaju actresses with a form of footbinding of the period
The earliest archeological evidence for foot binding dates to the tombs of Huang Sheng, who died in 1243 at the age of 17, and Madame Zhou, who died in 1274. Each woman's remains showed feet bound with gauze strips measuring in length. Zhou's skeleton, particularly well preserved, showed that her feet fit into the narrow, pointed slippers that were buried with her. The style of bound feet found in Song dynasty tombs, where the big toe was bent upwards, appears to be different from 'the 'three-inch golden lotus' of later eras. The more severe form of footbinding may have developed in the 16th century.
Later eras
At the end of the Song dynasty, men would drink from a special shoe, the heel of which contained a small cup. During the Yuan dynasty some would also drink directly from the shoe itself. This practice was called 'toast to the golden lotus' and lasted until the late Qing dynasty.The first European to mention foot binding was the Italian missionary Odoric of Pordenone in the 14th century, during the Yuan dynasty. However no other foreign visitors to Yuan China mentioned the practice, including Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo, perhaps an indication that it was not a widespread or extreme practice at that time. The Mongols themselves did not practice footbinding but it was permitted for their Chinese subjects. The practice became increasingly common among the gentry families, later spreading to the general populace, as commoners and theatre actors alike adopted foot binding. By the Ming period the practice was no longer the preserve of the gentry but it was considered a status symbol. As foot binding restricted the movement of a woman, one side effect of its rising popularity was the corresponding decline of the art of women's dance in China, and it became increasingly rare to hear about beauties and courtesans who were also great dancers after the Song era.
The Manchus issued a number of edicts to ban the practice, first in 1636 when the Manchu leader Hong Taiji declared the founding of the new Qing dynasty, then in 1638, and another in 1664 by the Kangxi Emperor. Few Han Chinese complied with the edicts, and Kangxi eventually abandoned the effort in 1668. By the 19th century, it was estimated that 40–50% of Chinese women had bound feet. Among upper class Han Chinese women, the figure was almost 100%. Bound feet became a mark of beauty and were also a prerequisite for finding a husband. They also became an avenue for poorer women to marry up in some areas, such as Sichuan. In late 19th century Guangdong it was customary to bind the feet of the eldest daughter of a lower-class family who was intended to be brought up as a lady. Her younger sisters would grow up to be bond-servants or domestic slaves and be able to work in the fields, but the eldest daughter would be assumed never to have the need to work. Women, their families and their husbands took great pride in tiny feet, with the ideal length, called the 'Golden Lotus', being about three Chinese inches long—around. This pride was reflected in the elegantly embroidered silk slippers and wrappings girls and women wore to cover their feet. Handmade shoes served to exhibit the embroidery skill of the wearer as well. These shoes also served as support, as some women with bound feet might not have been able to walk without the support of their shoes and would have been severely limited in their mobility. Contrary to missionary writings, many women with bound feet were able to walk and work in the fields, albeit with greater limitations than their non-bound counterparts.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, there were dancers with bound feet as well as circus performers who stood on prancing or running horses. Women with bound feet in one village in Yunnan Province formed a regional dance troupe to perform for tourists in the late 20th century, though age has since forced the group to retire. In other areas, women in their 70s and 80s assisted in the rice fields even into the early 21st century.
Decline
Opposition to foot binding had been raised by some Chinese writers in the 18th century. In the mid-19th century, many of the leaders of the Taiping Rebellion were men of Hakka background whose women did not bind their feet, and they outlawed foot binding in areas under their control. However the rebellion failed and Christian missionaries, who had provided education for girls and actively discouraged what they considered a barbaric practice that had deleterious social effect on women, then played a part in changing elite opinion on foot binding through education, pamphleteering and lobbying of the Qing court, as no other culture in the world practised the custom of foot binding.The earliest-known Western anti-foot binding society was formed in Amoy in 1874. 60–70 Christian women in Xiamen attended a meeting presided over by a missionary, John MacGowan, and formed the Natural Foot Society. MacGowan held the view that foot binding was a serious problem that called into doubt the whole of Chinese civilization; he felt that "the nefarious civilization interferes with Divine Nature." Members of the Heavenly Foot Society vowed not to bind their daughters' feet. In 1895, Christian women in Shanghai led by Alicia Little, also formed a Natural Foot Society. It was also championed by the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement founded in 1883 and advocated by missionaries including Timothy Richard, who thought that Christianity could promote equality between the sexes. This missionary-led opposition had stronger impacts than earlier Han or Manchu opposition. Western missionaries established the first schools for girls, and encouraged women to end the practice of foot binding. Christian missionaries did not conceal their shock and disgust either when explaining the process of foot binding to Western peers and their descriptions shocked their audience back home.
Reform-minded Chinese intellectuals began to consider foot binding to be an aspect of their culture that needed to be eliminated. In 1883, Kang Youwei founded the Anti-footbinding Society near Canton to combat the practice, and anti-foot binding societies appeared across the country, with membership for the movement claimed to reach 300,000. The anti-foot binding movement stressed pragmatic and patriotic reasons rather than feminist ones, arguing that abolition of foot binding would lead to better health and more efficient labour. Kang Youwei submitted a petition to the throne commenting on the fact that China had become a joke to foreigners and that "footbinding was the primary object of such ridicule."
Reformers such as Liang Qichao, influenced by Social Darwinism, also argued that it weakened the nation, since enfeebled women supposedly produced weak sons. In his "On Women's Education", Liang Qichao asserts that the root cause of national weakness inevitably lies the lack of education for women. Qichao connected education for women and foot binding: "As long as foot binding remains in practice, women's education can never flourish." Qichao was also disappointed that foreigners had opened the first schools as he thought that the Chinese should be teaching Chinese women. At the turn of the 20th century, early feminists, such as Qiu Jin, called for the end of foot binding. In 1906, Zhao Zhiqian wrote in Beijing Women's News to blame women with bound feet for being a national weakness in the eyes of other nations. Many members of anti-foot binding groups pledged to not bind their daughters' feet nor to allow their sons to marry women with bound feet. In 1902, Empress Dowager Cixi issued an anti-foot binding edict, but it was soon rescinded.
In 1912 the new Republic of China government banned foot binding, though the ban was not actively implemented, and leading intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement saw foot binding as a major symbol of China's backwardness. Provincial leaders, such as Yan Xishan in Shanxi, engaged in their own sustained campaign against foot binding with foot inspectors and fines for those who continued the practice, while regional governments of the later Nanjing regime also enforced the ban. The campaign against foot binding was successful in some regions. In one province, a 1929 survey showed that, while only 2.3% of girls born before 1910 had unbound feet, 95% of those born after were not bound. In a region south of Beijing, Dingxian, where over 99% of women once had bound feet, no new cases were found among those born after 1919. In Taiwan, the practice was also discouraged by the ruling Japanese from the beginning of Japanese rule, and from 1911 to 1915 it was gradually made illegal. The practice lingered on in some regions in China. In 1928, a census in rural Shanxi found that 18% of women had bound feet, while in some remote rural areas, such as Yunnan Province, it continued to be practiced until the 1950s. In most parts of China the practice had virtually disappeared by 1949. The practice was also stigmatized in Communist China, and the last vestiges of foot binding were stamped out, with the last new case of foot binding reported in 1957. By the 21st century, only a few elderly women in China still had bound feet. In 1999, the last shoe factory making lotus shoes, the Zhiqian Shoe Factory in Harbin, closed.