This is a rather gruesome post.  If you can’t cope with human cruelty and what one women will do to her daughter in the name of beauty I suggest you skip this one.

On 25th August this year I went with the Shanghai Expats Association to the Ancient Shoes Museum.  I had wanted to go ever since I had found out about the existence of this museum in Shanghai, as I had come across some tiny shoes at an Auction in the UK many years back and had been fascinated not only be the exquisite embroidery on the silk, but also by the size of them.  But as the owner of the museum Yang Shao Rong only speaks Shanghainese and no Mandarin, you have to go along to the museum with a local interpreter.  Jung Chang in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China had written about her grandmother’s lotus feet and many others have written in novels and other books about the process of foot binding, so I was surprised how shocked some of the other women were on the visit.  Sometimes we just don’t realise how well we in Britain are informed.

The museum was housed in Mr Rong’s apartment.  The walls of his living space are completely covered in cabinets full of these shoes, because he owns 1500 of them. I understand that the local authorities are interested in doing away with his museum, the previous mayor of Shanghai hated it – when this elderly man dies his collection may well disappear – as they are embarrassed by this part of their history and wish to brush it all away for good.  Anyway the foot binding of women was practised all over China and the collection contains examples of shoes from numerous provinces.

Foot binding was usually done by a girl’s mother – who of course had had the same thing done to her when she was young. As with FGM I always ask who on earth comes up with such barbaric ideas in the first place, no-one ever really knows, but there is a story that there was a beautiful concubine or princess, much favoured by the Emperor, who had exceptionally small feet and it was this need to be fashionable and in favour and marriageable that led to this practice of artificially shrinking the feet.  The practice first began just before the Song Dynasty  (Chinese: 宋朝; pinyin: Sòng cháo; 960–1279) when it became fashionable, a time when there were several other more useful inventions such as banknotes and gunpowder. Chinese women even nowadays are generally very small boned, much shorter than us westerners and usually have UK size 4 or smaller shoes.  It did involve wrapping the feet, but not until each one of the girls’ feet were broken at an angle across the metatarsals and the toes folded under the sole of the foot.  The feet were tied to a wooden stand with the feet sticking part way through the two holes in the stand and smacked with a stick (red one on right of stand) by either the girl’s mother or grandmother.  It was not optional. The toes were then bound in place under the foot’s sole.  Any woman with bound feet walked over her broken toes every step she took on her Lotus Feet for the rest of her life.  The ideal length was 3 Chinese inches long – “3” golden lotus”, the equivalent of 4″ or 10 cms shoes. (They were not called shoes).

The Owner’s Mother’s Bound Foot

Instructions For Wrapping

Foot Binding Cloths

The fold in the feet with enclosed skin were smelly and ugly and so socks and shoes were worn all the time to hide them, even in bed.  Rich women washed their feet every day.  A Chinese insult is to call someone “like a shoe band”.

Why was it really done?  It was a severe form of hobbling. Done to keep girls and women very firmly in a box and prevent them from straying from the home.  It kept them under their parents and then their husband’s rule.

Feet were bound in different ways depending on culture, geography and family background.  Not every single girl had her feet bound.  Very, very lowly peasants didn’t, but there were women with bound feet who worked in the fields, but their feet were not made as small as their wealthier contemporaries.  Qing Dynasty feet were bound so that

Narrow Qing 3″ lotus

they were narrow, not short, because of horse riding. Northern women, who are wheat eaters, had bigger bound feet than their southern rice-eating cousins. Northerners wore boots rather than shoes in the cold winters and  also Northern shoes had the tips pointing down, southerners the tips pointing up.

In general any girl of any standing in Chinese culture was never seen outside the home.  To go anywhere she was carried inside an enclosed palanquin.  She did not see the outside world, and the outside world did not see her.  She was allowed to sit at her front door behind a curtain that hid all but her shoes.  It was thus the size of her feet that “sold” her so the world.

Pig Boots For A Girl

Funeral Shoes with Red Ladder to Heaven

Sleeping Shoes With In-built Manual for What To Do

Really Tiny Shoes for Buddhist Temple Offerings

Red Wedding Shoes

Mr. Rong With His Mother’s 3″ Lotus Shoes.  No embroidery on them meant no news is good news.

White Funeral Shoes

Blocks for Embroidery

The shimmering butterfly signified a prostitute

Dance shoes with a powder drawer to leave patterns on the dance floor

Address:

Ao Sen Apartments in Hongqiao, 786 Hongzhong Lu
虹中路786，奥森公寓